Research Portfolio
Chih-Wen Lan
In Asian cities — Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok — religion is not a peripheral phenomenon but a foundational organizing force of urban life. Yet most urban analytical frameworks were built for Western contexts. My research argues that Asian cities deserve analytical methods built on their own terms, not borrowed from elsewhere.
How do multi-religious landscapes shape neighborhood identity, community structure, and urban morphology across time?
Can the spatial logic encoded in historic religious buildings be systematically quantified through GIS — making invisible cultural strategies visible?
How can research findings be translated into public-facing visualizations and planning tools that make hidden urban dimensions accessible?
Geocoding of historical addresses onto period base maps (Taiwan Century Historical Maps) to reconstruct the spatial environment at time of establishment.
Nearest-distance calculation between religious categories to quantify spatial competition and coexistence strategies between incoming and established traditions.
Buffer zone analysis measuring the proportion of religious facilities within transportation corridors — revealing spatial logic beyond visual impression.
Statistical index (R value) distinguishing uniform dispersion, random distribution, or spatial clustering across the full dataset of 40 churches.
Field-measured visual reach of church facades along major streets — proposed as a new measurable HUL planning parameter for heritage evaluation.
Field survey of 25 churches: recorded distances to schools, markets, military facilities, parks, and hospitals to reveal community embedding logic.
Spatial mapping of local and non-local religious networks across Taipei using GIS overlay, historical cartographic sources, and field survey. Establishing dataset and methodology.
Application of Distance Matrix, Nearest Neighbor, Count Points in Polygon, and Kernel Density analyses. Proposal of terminus vista distance. ICATI 2026 paper accepted.
Transfer of methodology to Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. Development of web visualization tools and public-facing platforms for multi-religious urban analysis.
The research presented here represents a decade of sustained inquiry into a question that most urban analytics frameworks have not asked: what does a city look like when religion is not a background condition but a primary spatial force?
I want to bring this question into contact with computational tools, visualization methods, and the interdisciplinary networks that can make it legible to planners, designers, and publics beyond academia. The goal is not simply to describe what Asian multi-religious cities are — but to build the analytical methods that will help us understand and shape what they are becoming.