Li Hou
Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design
Visiting Faculty
- Design & Social Equity
- History & Theory
- Land Use Law
- Sustainability
- Urbanism
Li Hou is Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she teaches courses on planning regulation, international planning practices, and analytic methods. She also supports the administration of the Urban Planning and Design programs and serves as an Urban Planning Academic Career Liaison with the GSD Office of Career Services. As an ACL, Li supports discipline-specific professional development through focused programming and student advising and serves as a critical link between Career Services, the Department of Urban Planning, industry partners, and across the GSD in support of students’ career goals.
Hou is a planning scholar, educator, and practitioner with over three decades of experience across China and the United States. Her research examines the intersections of planning history, regulation, spatial politics, and comparative urbanism. She has authored more than 60 book chapters and journal articles and regularly contributes to public media on urban and planning issues.
Her book Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State (Harvard Asia Center, 2018; reprinted in 2021) received the 2020 First Book Prize for the Most Innovative Book in Planning History from the International Planning History Society. The Chinese edition, published by SDX Joint Publishing Company in 2024, was selected as one of Yicai’s ten best nonfiction books of the year. Her other books include Richard Paulick in Shanghai, 1933–1949: The Postwar Planning and Reconstruction of a Modern Chinese Metropolis (Tongji University Press, 2016) and contributions to An Academic History in China’s Urban and Rural Planning Discipline (China Science and Technology Press, 2018).
Before joining Harvard, Hou was Professor of Urban Planning at Tongji University, where she also directed the Ph.D. program in Urban and Rural Planning. She has been a research affiliate at the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab since 2023, an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong since 2025, and a Coordinate Research Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 2014 to 2015. In practice, she has been a registered planner at the Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute since 2000, an expert member of the Shanghai City Planning Commission since 2012, and vice secretary-general for the Academic Committee of Regulatory Planning, Urban Planning Society of China, since 2018. She is also a council member of the International Planning History Society and a board member of the Global Urban History Project.
Hou’s intellectual trajectory is closely connected to her personal history. She grew up in a North China oil field at a time when urbanism was often criticized as capitalist, an early experience that later shaped her scholarship on oil, company towns, planning ideology, and socialist state formation. She entered Tongji University to study architecture and urban planning and later came to Harvard GSD with support from the Frank Tsao Chinese Teachers’ Fund. At Harvard, she received a Master of Design Studies in urbanization and housing and a Doctor of Design with a dissertation on oil, company towns, personal memory, and national politics. She is also the mother of two children raised between Shanghai and Cambridge.