Abingo Wu

Education

Bachelor of Engineering/City Planning, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China 
Advanced Master of Architecture, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands
PhD in Architecture, University of California, Berkeley

Biography

Jiong (Abingo) Wu is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the UVA School of Architecture and is founder of AbingoWu Studio, an interdisciplinary research and design practice. She held a prior appointments as faculty at Syracuse University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and South China University of Technology teaching across architecture and urban design.

Abingo's research explores global housing through the lens of social agency and innovation, with a focus on multi-generational living, migrant co-housing, informal settlements, and the dynamics between village and urban middle-class housing. This includes research utilizing a broad range of methodologies including ethnography, GIS and humanistic mapping, oral history, and media analysis. 

Her research on global housing has been disseminated in numerous peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings including Villages in the City: A Guide to South China's Informal Settlements (edited by Stefan Al, Hong Kong University Press) and Making the Village Middle Class: New Living Landscapes and Social Subjectivities in Chinese Peri-urban. Her work "Re-exploring Bottom-up Design: Alternative Housing Practices in Guangzhou's Urbanizing Villages" was exhibited in the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture titled Cities, Grow in Difference.

Abingo's dissertation, Living Low: Housing and Life in Guangzhou Villages-by-the-city", supported by The Joseph R. Levenson Chinese Studies Award, provides an architectural ethnography of the housing practices in Guangzhou villages-by-the-city, while also identifying broader social and housing trends in contemporary China. It draws on extensive documentations and ethnographic fieldwork, while examining the roles of housing design, construction, management, and consumption in re-configuring village domestic spaces, lifestyles, and village organizations from 1978 to 2017. 

Abingo is currently developing two books: one on typological responses to the global pandemic, and a second, sole-authored architectural ethnography manuscript focused on self-built housing in Southern China, currently under review with a university press.