Sai Balakrishnan

City and Regional Planning

Sai Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, in a joint appointment with DCRP and GMS (Global Metropolitan Studies). Her research and teaching broadly pivot around global urban inequalities, with a particular focus on urbanization and planning institutions in the global south, and on the spatial politics of land-use and property. She has worked as an urban planner in the United States, India, and the United Arab Emirates, and as a consultant to the UN-HABITAT, Nairobi. Her book, Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) explores new forms of urbanization along infrastructural / economic corridors in liberalizing India. Balakrishnan is currently working on two books: i) global-comparative research on the transfer of development rights (TDRs), a new land (and air) commodification instrument, in Mumbai, New York and São Paulo, and ii) in collaboration with historian Arindam Dutta (MIT), a spatial mapping of infrastructural inequalities and the new geographies of uneven development in post-liberalization India.