Housing wealth accumulation and inequality in urban China
Funding period: 20 January 2025 – 20 October 2025
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
Dr Can Cui is a professor at the School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University. She earned a doctoral degree in Human Geography and Spatial Planning from Utrecht University and a master’s degree in geographic information science from Nanjing University. Prior to joining ECNU, she worked as a Pollman Fellow at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.
Her primary research interest lies in the field of housing studies and migration in relation to social, economic and urban transformation. Against the background of China’s rapid urbanization and housing marketization, she focuses on housing career disparities, generational differences in housing pathways, intergenerational transmission of housing inequality, and talent migration in the process of the socio-economic transformation of the country. She mainly employs quantitative approaches to analyze national and city-level surveys; in recent years, she has extended to adopting qualitative approaches to investigate housing and migration strategies of residents in China. Since May 2020, she has been involved in an international collaborative research project titled ‘Urban Housing of Migrants in China and the Netherlands’, which adopts a comparative approach to examine housing issues in both countries.
As a USF International Fellow, Dr Cui will visit the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam under the mentorship of Prof. Richard Ronald.
During her visit, she will focus on examining housing wealth inequality among residents in urban China, with specific attention to the role of price appreciation in wealth accumulation. Furthermore, she plans to adopt a comparative approach of asset-based welfare to analyze the similarities and differences in housing wealth inequality between China and other countries.
Profile at ECNU | Profile at Researchgate | giscuican@gmail.com