Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist and planner working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance and the environment. 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 work demonstrates the agency of marginalised groups in challenging dominant urbanisms through ethnography, storytelling and multimedia formats. She is deeply interested in reimagining planning practice by drawing from fisher knowledge and the turbulences, liquidities and temporalities of the ocean.
M.A. (Pune),
Ph.D. (Rutgers)
Urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance and the environment.
- A short film, Sagarputra, and fisher archive documenting the experiences of the indigenous fishing community on Mumbai’s east coast to understand changing conceptions of habitation and value at the water’s edge.
"Participolis: Consent and Contention in Neoliberal Urban India, 2013, Edited by Karen Coelho, Lalitha Kamath and M. Vijayabaskar, Routledge: New Delhi.
Commoning the Established Order of Property: Reclaiming Fishing Commons in Mumbai, Urbanisation 2020 (with Gopal Dubey)
Co-edited a special issue Enduring Harms: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 46(4): 651-659.
She is the Chairperson of the Centre for Urban Policy & Governance, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.