Prof Lalitha Kamath is Professor and Chairperson of the Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. She has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy Development from Rutgers University.
Prof Kamath’s research interests include urban governance, planning, infrastructure, urban informality, and critical pedagogies. She writes on dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments. Her writing also demonstrates the agency of marginalized groups in challenging dominant urbanisms through ethnography, film and multimedia formats (see https://www.inhabitedsea.org/the-sea-and-the-city and https://makebreak.tiss.edu/)
Based on her ongoing work on climate planning in Mumbai, in her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof Kamath is doing two comparisons with estuarine cities in the U.S. and South Asia. First, to illuminate how expert-led planning interventions have marginalized littoral communities/environments and also how these communities demonstrate ‘ordinary’ expertise in climate changed cities. Second, to deepen cross-fertilization between Northern and Southern theoretical perspectives that challenge dominant planning expertise by building from the situated expertise of marginalized communities. This will help catalyze more just climate planning across both South and North