EDRA's Great Places Awards recognize work that combines expertise in design, research, and practice, and contributes to the creation of dynamic, humane places that engage our attention and imagination. Zhao won the 2024 Place Research category award for her entry "Making Participants the Photographers: Meaning of Home As Seen through the Eyes of Rural Residents in China."
The EDRA Achievement Award is given to an individual or group in recognition of a significant contribution — a book, publication, project, research, method or service — made to the field of environmental design research. Jurors chose Zhao's book "Home Beyond the House: Transformation of Life, Place and Tradition in Rural China" (Routledge, March 2024). Her faculty profile on the University of Illinois website describes the work:
"Based on extended fieldwork and archival research conducted over 12 years, this project examines the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. Drawing upon over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, the study links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: the meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle. More importantly, this study empowers rural residents by giving them a voice."
See all Great Places Award winners
here, and Achievement Awards
here.
Zhao joined SAH in 2011 and received a SAHARA Travel Fellowship in 2012. According to her Illinois faculty bio:
"Her research focuses on the built environment of underrepresented social groups and issues of social equity and sustainability, and cultural diversity in the context of globalization and urbanization. Incorporating theories and methods from Architecture, urban studies, historic preservation, heritage studies, and anthropology, Zhao’s work expands the body of knowledge in architectural and environmental design research by envisioning the built environment not as simply technocratic entities, but rather as contextual, relational, and cultural, and sometimes consanguineous, constructs and as systems of relationships, activities, local knowledge, cultural values, and meanings.
"In addition to research, Zhao is a licensed architect in the United States. She runs a multidisciplinary design, research, and consulting practice, MPlacez, which aims to provide innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to making places that are culturally rooted and socially sustainable."