About Me

I hold a PhD degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My research interests include urban and regional development and the use of urban data to conduct policy analysis, such as quantitative and mixed-method analysis and spatial analysis, to examine urban issues ranging from affordable housing, integrated transportation, land use, demography, to environment and energy consumption. 

My dissertation studies affordable housing policies, residential mobility and long-term unintended spatial-demographic consequences of government housing regulations using Singapore as a case. My study shows that despite extensive studies regarding the interdependency of household life cycle stages and moving decisions in demography, most existing policy analysis tools (e.g. land-use-and-transportation simulations) do not address households changing life cycle stages when modeling residential relocation behavior. The reasons include 1) the data that capture households and housing transitions is hard to obtain, and 2) the analysis methods are mainly for cross-sectional datasets. My dissertation focuses on these issues and contributes to the literature in three respects: behavior exploration, methodology, and applications to housing and transportation policy analysis. The ultimate goal of my dissertation is to have a better understanding of the relationship between household life cycle stages and their moving decisions when the housing market is heavily regulated with incentives based on age, family structure, and income. 

I have conducted research projects in a broad spectrum of sustainable urban and transportation development projects, such as evaluating the long-term impact of autonomous vehicles on households’ vehicle ownership decisions in Singapore, comparing different pricing policies on the urban transportation system in Lisbon, Portugal, and evaluating urban development scenarios in terms of their effects in reducing vehicle miles travelled (VMT) in Boston, USA. 

I received a Master in City Planning (MCP) from MIT and a B. Eng. in Urban and Regional Planning from Peking University. 

If you have any questions, please contact me at my work email: xujs [at] mit [dot] edu.