Sai Balakrishnan joins UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor of Global Urban Inequalities. Prior to that, she taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Rutgers University. Through her research and teaching, Dr. Balakrishnan focuses on urbanization and planning institutions in the global south, and on the spatial politics of land and property. Her recent book, Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), looks at urbanization along economic corridors in India, and the agrarian-urban land conflicts in these new spatial forms of urbanization. She is one of the primary instructors for the core courses for the Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS 200 and GMS201).
Desiree Fields
I am an economic geographer and critical urban scholar, and I study how financial processes and digital technologies are shifting the terrain of the housing question in the 21st century. In addition to teaching in Global Metropolitan Studies and my home department of Geography, I am also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation and an editor at the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
Graduate courses: GMS200: Histories, Theories, and Methods of Global Metropolitan Studies; GEOG247: Digital Transformations in Land, Housing, and Property
Personal website: https://www.desireefields.org/
Post was hired through the Global Metropolitan Studies initiative to enhance the university's strength in comparative urban studies. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative urban politics and comparative political economy, focusing on Latin America and the developing world more broadly. It examines the political and institutional factors affecting vital urban services such as water and sanitation, mass transit, and electricity. She has received U.C. Berkeley's campus-wide Carol D. Soc award for mentoring graduate students. She is one of the primary instructors for the core courses for the Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS 200 and GMS201).
Walker was hired through the Global Metropolitan Studies initiative to enhance the university's strength in urban infrastructure systems. Her research focuses on transportation systems, with a particular focus on behavioral modeling. She works to improve the models that are used for transportation planning, policy, and operations. Walker currently serves as a Co-Director of GMS, and she is one of the primary instructors for the core courses for the Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS 200 and GMS201).