Co-Directors

Anna Brand

Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning

Anna Livia Brand is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. Her research focuses on the historical urban and environmental development and contemporary planning and landscape design challenges in Black mecca neighborhoods in the American North and South. Anna’s work examined how redevelopment paradigms in the 21st century reflect ongoing racialization and the compounding landscapes of racial capitalism. In her scholarship and creative work, she also gives focus to reparative and abolitionist imaginaries that counter racial oppression. Her work on post-Katrina New Orleans examines how racial geographies have been reconstructed after the storm through disciplines like urban planning.

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.