Research

Five interconnected research lines organise Junyao He’s work. Complex networks and complex systems provide the shared analytical foundation. The empirical questions span economic geography, urban studies, mobility and migration, planning governance, and computational social science. Several interactive map and network atlases from recent and ongoing research are listed below.

Interactive maps

Standalone visualisations linked to current research projects.

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Mobility, migration, and uneven spatial outcomes

Major active research line.

Mobility is relational. Cities and regions are shaped by the origins, destinations, volumes, and composition of the flows connecting them. Junyao He uses network approaches to study residential relocation, interregional migration, digital nomad mobility, and changing access to employment and urban opportunity. A central question concerns the uneven distribution of opportunity under new mobility regimes. Remote workers, digitally mobile professionals, and different demographic groups may respond differently to the same spatial conditions. Layered mobility networks make these heterogeneous responses visible. His digital-nomad research connects city-to-city mobility networks with individual trajectories, destination choice, and patterns of staying and return.

Related work in MOBI-TWIN examines the effects of spatial mobility on regional inequality and sustainability. It also studies how regional cognitive composition relates to development trajectories under the green and digital transitions.

Representative work

Remote work, job-home networks, and regional inequality

Major active research line.

Remote and hybrid work change the spatial relationship between employment and residence. Junyao He examines job-home networks as the main unit of spatial organisation and traces changes in their reach, hierarchy, and distribution. This work asks whether flexible work expands labour market reach, redistributes employment and residential centrality, and produces different outcomes across places and populations. His published study of Spain compares job-home networks across levels of workplace-attendance frequency. Ongoing research in the Netherlands and Belgium uses longitudinal data and causal inference to examine how remote-work exposure reshaped these networks after the COVID-19 shock, including spatial spillovers and population heterogeneity.

Representative work

AI, innovation, and computational economic geography

Emerging research line.

AI and digital transformation are reshaping regional economies. Junyao He is developing relational approaches that use large-scale news text to identify cooperation, competition, innovation, and attention networks across subnational regions. This work combines network analysis, natural language processing, and interpretable machine learning to study regional capabilities and uneven development. Related work examines how policy discourse shapes the institutionalisation and governance of AI in urban planning in China and Europe.

Representative work

Digital planning, platform governance, and networked power

Established research line.

Digital platforms have become important arenas for planning participation, controversy, and legitimacy. Junyao He’s doctoral research examined how social media reshapes interaction networks, discursive influence, and power inequalities in collaborative planning in China. This work develops network-based approaches to power that connect interaction structure with discourse, framing, and institutional authority. It examines how citizens, third parties, journalists, experts, and public authorities translate online visibility into influence over planning processes. Current co-authored work examines how urban regeneration and social media platforms shape the presentation of industrial heritage and the distribution of tourism value.

Representative work

Complex networks and complex systems methods

Cross-cutting methodological line.

Across these empirical fields, Junyao He treats cities, regions, mobility systems, and digital public spheres as complex relational systems. His work combines network measurement with spatial dependence, causal inference, simulation, and interpretable prediction. He works with multilayer and temporal networks, directed centrality, community structure, and entropy-based measures of network reach. Spatial interaction and HDFE-PPML models are used alongside difference-in-differences, spatial spillover analysis, Bartik designs, and double machine learning.

His MOBI-TWIN work combines agent-based modelling and spatial microsimulation. Other methodological work uses iterative proportional fitting to reconstruct population networks, connects network analysis with discourse analysis, and uses street-view imagery and AI to examine urban environments.

Representative work

See also Methods and analytical approaches and Complex networks as a shared framework.

Collaboration

Junyao He welcomes collaboration on complex networks, spatial mobility, remote work, migration, economic geography, digital planning, and computational urban research. Enquiries concerning papers, data, or research collaboration can be sent to j.he@rug.nl or junyaohe.utrecht@gmail.com .