Rahul Mehrotra is a practicing architect, urban designer, and educator. He is a professor of urban design and planning and chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). His firm, RMA Architects, founded in 1990 in Mumbai, has designed projects for government and nongovernmental agencies, and corporate as well as private individuals and institutions. The firm has initiated several unsolicited projects driven by a commitment to advocacy in the city of Mumbai and has recently finished a campus for an NGO that works with poor children, and (with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative) developed a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal. Among other projects, RMA is currently working on a housing project for elephants and their caretakers in Jaipur, corporate offices in Hyderabad, and private houses throughout India. Mehrotra has long been involved in civic and urban affairs in Mumbai, where he has served on historic preservation and environmental commissions, partnered with neighborhood groups, and directed the Urban Design Research Institute from 1994 to 2004. He has also lectured and written extensively on architecture, conservation, and urban planning in Mumbai and India. Conserving an Image Center: The Fort Precinct in Bombay, a study he coauthored, led to this historic area being declared a conservation precinct in 1995 — the first such designation in India. Other publications include books on the Victoria Terminus Station, a world heritage site in Mumbai, and most recently, on the city’s Art Deco buildings. Mehrotra edited The Architecture of the 20th Century in the South Asian Region and the first of three books documenting the 2004 Michigan Debates on Urbanism. He studied at the Ahmedabad School of Architecture and graduated with a master’s degree in urban design from Harvard GSD.