Theo A. Arentze

"All of the built environment as we know it has been designed and its features have a significant impact on our wellbeing and behavior. It is my ambition to contribute to the creation of high quality built environments by the study of what people need and how they interact with the built environment."    

Theo Arentze is Full Professor of Real Estate and Urban Systems and chair of the Real Estate Management and Development group in the department of the Built Environment of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His research focuses on the analysis and modeling of spatial choice behavior of users in the built environment and application of these models for large-scale simulation and decision support. A general aim of his research is to increase behavior realism of spatial choice models by incorporating bounded rationality. He has made contributions in the areas of decision support systems, activity-based modeling, discrete choice modeling, agent-based modeling, human cognition/learning, social network modeling and personal information systems.

His current research focus extends to the study and modeling of behavior of actors in real estate management and development. The goal is to analyze and predict behavior as well as to develop decision support systems for real-estate management and development.

Theo received his MSc in psychology from Groningen University, with a specialization in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. At TU/e, he received a PhD from the Urban Planning group in the department of the Built Environment.  

Theo has published over 220 articles in international peer reviewed journals (as first and co-author) on transportation, urban planning, geography, marketing and consumer research. He is member of the editorial board of several international peer-reviewed journals and acts as an ad-hoc reviewer and program committee member for many journals, conferences and research facilities.

His team is multidisciplinary including management, psychology, sociology, geography and economics. The research of his team comprises the areas of real-estate management, neighborhood development (place making), housing and urban economics with a strong emphasis on behavior research and with topics related to healthy living environments and work places, new business concepts, senior housing and healthy cities.