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Neema Kudva

  • Professor (on leave)

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Academic Research Areas

  • Community-based planning and development
  • Housing
  • Infrastructure planning
  • International studies in planning
  • NGOs
  • Participatory and collaborative planning
  • Social policy
  • Sustainability
  • Mobility

Neema Kudva’s research focuses on small cities and their regions and on institutional structures for equitable planning and development. She has explored various aspects of these issues, primarily in South Asia but also in the U.S. and across the world, with students. She is involved in pedagogical experiments around citizenship and sustainability planning and is faculty lead for the Nilgiris Field Learning Center, Kotagiri, a transdisciplinary engaged collaboration between Cornell and the Keystone Foundation, India.

At Cornell, Kudva is the senior associate dean for academic affairs; house professor and dean at Becker House, a living-learning residential community; and co-chair of the AAP Council for Diversity & Inclusion. She serves as a faculty affiliate of the South Asia Program, a fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and a field member for public affairs, Asian studies, development sociology, and visual studies. Prior to joining Cornell in 2001, Kudva worked as a consultant to public planning agencies in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as as an architect in India and Europe.

Kudva received her Dip.Arch. from the School of Architecture CEPT at Ahmedabad, India, in 1989; and her M.Arch./M.C.P. and Ph.D. from the University of California–Berkeley in 2001.

headshot of a woman with long dark hair wearing a black shirt and glasses resting on the top of her head

Academic Research Areas

  • Community-based planning and development
  • Housing
  • Infrastructure planning
  • International studies in planning
  • NGOs
  • Participatory and collaborative planning
  • Social policy
  • Sustainability
  • Mobility

Slow Conservation in the Nilgiris Field Learning Center: An Integrative Model of Education, Research, and Practice.

Infographic with description of seven binaries that structure sustainable debates.
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I am interested in practices and institutions that undergird equitable planning. I look for organizing principles in the everyday and in the exceptional, which help generate resistance as well as equitable, beautiful, and just ways of being.

Publications

  • Acquiescence in the Face of Dispossession in the Mahindra World City Economic Zone, Tamil Nadu, India

    Subramanyam, Nidhi, and Neema Kudva. 2020. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 39 (1): 114–31.

  • Slow Conservation in the Nilgiris Field Learning Center: An Integrative Model of Education, Research, and Practice

    Wolf, Steven, Neema Kudva, Anita Varghese, Andrew Willford, Snehlata Nath, Pratim Roy, and Rebecca Stoltzfus. 2018. Current Conservation 12 (4).

  • The Future City: Critical Interventions for Equity, Debate 3

    2018. In Informal Urbanisms: Emergent Approaches to Urban Transformations. Edited by Kyle Farrell. Helsinki: Opus Liberum.

  • Small Cities, Big Issues: Indian Cities in the Debates on Urban Poverty and Inequality

    2015. In Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World. Edited by Faranak Miraftab, Ken Salo, and David Wilson. London and New York: Routledge.

  • Cities of the Global South Reader

    Miraftab, Faranak, and Neema Kudva. 2014. Routledge.

Classes

  • Urban Theory

    CRP 5190

  • Urban Transformations in the Global South

    CRP 6740

  • Current Debates on NGOs

    CRP 6150

  • Planning and Sustainability, the Case of the Nilgiris Biosphere (Kotagiri, India)

    CRP 3850

Selected Awards, Grants, and Fellowships

  • Engaged Opportunity Grant

    “Stories of Solidarity: Experiencing COVID in the Global South”
    2020

  • Engaged Curriculum Development Grant

    “Continuing Curricular Development for Engaged Research and Learning at the Nilgiris Field Learning Center in Ithaca, NY, and Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu, India” with Steven Wolfe, Andrew Willford, and Lucinda Ramberg (Cornell University), Carol Babiracki and Emera Bridger (Syracuse University), Pratim Roy, Anita Varghese, and Jyotsna Krishnakumar (Keystone Foundation).
    2019

  • Engaged Cornell, Einaudi Center, and Small Grants Fund at the Institute for Social Sciences, Cornell University

    “Ecological Learning Collaboratory for Food, Healing, and Spacial Justice” workshop with Stacey Langwick and Rachel Bezner-Kerr.
    2018

  • NRC Syracuse-Cornell South Asia Consortium, U.S. Department of State, Einaudi Center, and Cornell CRP

    “Urban South Asia Writ Small” interdisciplinary conference with Dan Gold (Cornell University), Ann Gold and Carol Babiracki (Syracuse University).
    2018

  • Senior Long Term Research Fellow, American Institute of Indian Studies

    Chicago and Dehli
    2017

  • Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award, Cornell University

    2015

Selected Exhibitions and Presentations

  • Thinking Tech: in, of, and for Planners and Citymakers

    Conference on Critical Technologies: Urban Tech for Social Impact, Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech and Technion Israel Institute of Technology, June 2021.

  • Full Circle

    . . . and injustice for all (webinar series), West Campus House System, May 2021.

  • Facing the Frontier in a Year of Pandemic and Protest

    Conference on Planning Futures: Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Abolitionist Planning, Columbia University, March 2021.

  • Our Cities, Our Selves, Our Institutions: Planning During COVID

    5th Annual Research on Cities Summer ACRCS 5.0, School of Human Settlements, Xavier University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India, February 2021.

  • Crossing Boundaries Everyday: One Pedagogical Exercise at the Nilgiris Field Learning Center

    Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Conference, November 2020.

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