Austin Williams

Austin Williams is senior lecturer in Architecture and Professional Practice at Kingston School of Art in London, and Honorary Research Fellow at XJTLU University, Suzhou, China where he lived for 6 years and helped set up the XJTLU Architecture department in 2011, teaching urban design and studio.

He is the director of the Future Cities Project, the China correspondent for The Architectural Review, and the author of "China's Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-cities" (2018) and “New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future” (2019).

Williams founded the mantownhuman manifesto, featured in Penguin Classics’ “100 Artists Manifestos” and has spoken at a wide range of conferences, from New York to Ningbo; from Hawaii to Hong Kong. He is a regular media commentator on development, environmentalism and China. He has written for media outlets as diverse as Nature, Wired; Top Gear; Daily Telegraph; the Times Literary Supplement; spiked, and; The Economist.

He directed over 200 short documentaries for NBSTV and authored and illustrated the “Shortcuts” design guides. His documentary "Che Fang/Edge Town" (directed by Jiang Hao) was shortlisted in the AHRC Research in Film documentary awards in 2018.