Beijing in Numbers

In a blog post from last summer, we looked at some interesting facts about China and compared it to Europe and the USA. From the image below, you can get the basic point we made back then - China is very big and the population is more than twice that of the European Union. In today's post, we're going to focus in on Beijing (which means 'northern capital') - the venue for our international conference in June this year.

Beijing is an amazing city - or city region, if you prefer to look at it like that - and is possibly best described in the first instance by using some numbers...

• 19,612,368 - population of Beijing municipality at the time of the 2010 Census. This is almost the same as the population of Romania and about 3 million more than live in The Netherlands, our last conference host nation.

• 16 - the number of districts within the Beijing municipality. For comparison, New York City has 5 Boroughs, London has 33 districts (32 Boroughs + the City of London), Paris has 20 arrondissements.

• 3,500,000 - population of Chaoyang District, the most highly populated district within Beijing.

• 8.1% - Beijing's GDP growth in 2011.

• 30°C (86°F) - average daily high temperature in June in Beijing.

• 1,266 - km from Beijing to Shanghai (787 miles). That's about the same distance as Madrid to Paris.

• 10 - time in minutes it will take you to walk from the conference hotel to the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium if you are going to the conference.

• 40 - degrees north of the Equator is the latitude of Beijing. This is the roughly the same as New York City, Madrid and Ankara.

• 0 - number of times the Regional Studies Association has hosted a Beijing conference in the past. It should be a very exciting new experience for us all!

For those who are going to Beijing, we look forward to seeing you there. For those who can't make it, we promise we'll report back on how we get on...

Sally Paddles the Thames

If you happen to be watching television on Sunday 3 June 2012 you might see coverage of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, an event in London to celebrate 60 years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom. "What on earth does this have to do with Regional Studies?", you might ask. Well, if you look more closely at the flotilla moving down the Thames you might just notice a certain Sally Hardy in her Kayak! The RSA Chief Executive is a bit of a fitness-fanatic and has extensive experience of the canoeing disciplines so it's only natural that she's there. The RSA blog squad have not been able to confirm whether she'll be asking fellow participants to become RSA members but we suspect that - for once - this is not the case.

Click image to see the pdf...

As you can see from the photo above, this story really is true and you can read more about the event here. As the Queen celebrates 60 years on the throne and Sally celebrates 25 years on her 'throne', we hear a whisper that there is another Sally-related celebration occurring on 3 June. Rumour has it that Sally celebrates her birthday that day, but given data protection rules we can't possibly reveal the figure (though we hear it rhymes with 'nifty').

Delft Redux...

The Delft conference has been and gone, and it was a very successful and enjoyable event! Hundreds of papers were presented, lots of new friends were made and many old friends were able to re-connect. The RSA blog squad are also able to report that the fine hostelries of Deflt continue to serve fine quality products. 

But this post is about something else. Today we want to publicise the fact that for the first time you can now see what happened at the conference via the video capture of the live stream from the opening session, chaired by former RSA Chair Professor Gordon Dabinett from the University of Sheffield, UK. Just click on the image below to see the opening session and some great presentations...

This innovation has been welcomed by our members (and non-members) and the view count is mounting up! Since the moment we announced on the RSA twitter page that we'd be doing this, interest has been growing. Of course, this is partly due to the expert handling of this media by the TU Delft team but also down to Gordon Dabinett's super-efficient chairing of the session. The role of Chair for the opening session now involves running to an even tighter schedule and as you'll see from the video this was expertly handled!

Now that we're all back to our 'normal', busy lives the memories of Delft may fade but the video will be there forever. Well, perhaps not forever but for a long time.

Next up, Beijing! Look out for a Beijing blog in the near future...