Professor Chris Webster is Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong. Formerly he was head of the Cardiff School of Planning and Geography, where he had been teaching and researching since 1984.

A strong advocate of quantitative methods, he is working on the incorporation of sDNA into existing practice. Before taking up a university post he worked as an urban planner in London and as an economic modeller in a development bank in Bangkok.

He is often regarded as an economist because of his style of analysis, but most of his economics has, in fact, been learnt on the job. He is committed to interdisciplinary research, believing that triangulation across paradigms and methods leads to greater insight than is often found in mono-disciplinary scholarship.

Since 1999 he has co-organised a multi-disciplinary network investigating the global spread of gated communities and private urban governance. Over the years he has also worked on a variety of training projects with UN agencies and has always maintained an Asian strand in his research portfolio. He first visited mainland China in 1983 and is currently running an ESRC/DFID project investigating the evolution of property rights and urban poverty in six Chinese cities. He is probably one of the only professors anywhere to be an editor of both a research journal (co-editor of Environment and Planning B) and a teaching journal (founding editor of CEBE Transactions).

His commitment to excellence in teaching and to maintaining a healthy teaching-research-practice link within universities led him to set up the Centre for Education in the Built Environment, which he has directed since 2000.