I am Christine Wen, an assistant professor of urban planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, specializing in economic development and municipal finance.

My mission is to develop knowledge systems that expand human capacity and promote

communication → collaboration → collective reasoning → cohesion across diverse communities.

[2025.02]

I'm teaching GIS and the quantitative half of a methods course - with focus on integrating theory, technique, and workflow logic through arcPy/Notebook and R/Markdown, respectively.

I'm generating estimates of efficiency gains from expanding and consolidating Ontario's municipal water and wastewater services by modeling scale and scope economies.

Last semester, my undergrad studio concluded with students presenting their development concept with massing, market, and feasibility studies to CreateTO for a vacant Port Lands site.

research + teaching

municipal finance and tax policy: this research promotes fair taxation as well as adequate, efficient, equitable, accountable public service delivery. One project resulted in an original database of disaggregated index measuring the severity of U.S. state restrictions with regard to local revenue and spending. Others examine the impact of business tax incentives on public services like education. A new project involves assessing economies of scale and scope for water and wastewater services in Ontario.

children and the economy: this research informs development planning around children and childcare, early psychological development, schooling and educational equity, and youth workforce training/socialization, focusing on the increasingly pervasive role of urban technology and evolving human-machine relationships in labor production; the first part has focused on development planning affects school funding equity.

teaching areas:

public finance, and general urban economics

planning methods, including statistics, GIS, and advanced applications

theory related to planning and development sociology

publications

C. Wen, E. Marcello, & M. Warner (2025) "The fiscal impact of tax abatements on New York's school districts" Journal of Urban Affairs. [link]

C. Wen (2024) "Do economic development tax abatements affect school finances?" Economic Development Quarterly, 38 (1), 3-14. [link]

C. Wen & G. LeRoy (2023) "Making the students pay? The gross fiscal cost of tax incentives for U.S. school districts." Community Development, 54 (4), 479-495. [link]

C. Wen (2020) "Educating rural migrant children in interior China: The promise and pitfall of low-fee private schools." International Journal of Educational Development 79. [link]

C. Wen, Y. Xu, Y. Kim, & M. Warner (2020) "Starving counties, squeezing cities: Tax and expenditure limits in the U.S." Journal of Economic Policy Reform 23 (2), 101-119. [link]

C. Wen & J. Wallace (2019) "Toward human-centered urbanization? Housing ownership and access to social insurance among migrant households in China." Sustainability 11(13), 3567-3581. [link]