Every building begins as someone's decision and becomes everyone's environment.

Bo Li is an Assistant Professor in Real Estate and Urban Development at the Department of the Built Environment of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), in the Netherlands. As an urban geographer and planner, he studies housing as both a political-economic system and a lived experience. His research is comparative and cross-national, with cases in China and Europe, and follows two lines:

1. The political economy of housing: how housing markets financialize, how rental sectors are governed, and how affordability problems and housing crises build up across countries and reshape residents' costs and wealth. Recent work extends this to the fiscal foundations of property markets and the distributional effects of housing transactions.
2. Housing decisions and residential wellbeing: how households choose where and how to live, from renting and buying to migration, settlement, and the adoption of low-carbon retrofits, and how housing shapes their satisfaction, social inclusion, and quality of life. Here he draws on behavioural and psychological theory, including the theory of planned behaviour and prospect theory.

To study these questions, he builds large-scale listing and transaction datasets and combines them with choice experiments, survey methods, and qualitative and institutional analysis.

A recurring aim across both lines is to connect the structural forces that drive housing markets to the choices households make within them. To support this, he is developing cross-country data infrastructure on housing listings and transactions in China and Europe, which lets the same questions be asked and compared across very different institutional settings.

Bo Li secured competitive research funding as principal investigator, including an NWO Rubicon Fellowship and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (awarded, and declined in favour of his faculty appointment). He is associate editor of the Journal of Urban Management and of Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, guest editor of a special issue for Buildings, and a board member of the Research Committee on Housing and Built Environment (RC43) of the International Sociological Association. He reviews for many housing, urban, and planning journals and for research proposals, and is a member of the International Association for China Planning.
Bo has presented his work at international scientific conferences across Europe and Asia and publishes in leading housing and urban studies journals. He also brings his research to policy and public audiences, through invited talks for local government and Chinese-language writing for a wider readership. He received the Best Paper Award for Junior Scholars (First Prize) at the Urban China Research Network conference.
Bo obtained his PhD in Urban Studies from Delft University of Technology in 2023, with a dissertation on the private rented sector in metropolitan China. He then held an NWO Rubicon Fellowship in the sociology department of the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität Berlin, where he worked on the historical and comparative financialization of rental housing. He joined TU/e in 2026. Before turning to housing and urban studies, he trained in civil engineering and quantity surveying in China.

At TU/e, Bo Li teaches in the Urban Systems and Real Estate programme. He is course coordinator and main lecturer for Quantitative Research Methods and Statistics, and contributes as a lecturer to Healthy and Sustainable Living Environments. Before joining TU/e, he taught urban sociology at Freie Universität Berlin. In his teaching, he shows students how to put quantitative methods to work on real questions in housing and the built environment, so that data and theory become tools for understanding how cities and housing markets actually behave, and who gains or loses within them.

Real Estate and Urban Development

International Sociological Association, RC43 Housing and Built Environment (Board Member)
International Association for China Planning (IACP)