Prof. Ayona Datta

Principal Investigator

Ayona Datta is Professor in Urban Geography in University College London. Her research focuses on postcolonial urbanism, gender citizenship, and the politics of urbanisation. Her current research seeks to advance theoretical and empirical insights into postcolonial urbanism through the investigation of smart cities as experiments in urban futures in the global south. In 2019, she was awarded the Busk Medal from Royal Geographical Society for her work on smart cities through fieldwork.

Prof. Datta is author of ‘City Bypassed’ and ‘City Forgotten’. She is author of ‘The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement’ (Ashgate, 2012); co-editor of ‘Mega-Urbanisation in the Global South: Fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Translocal Geographies: Spaces, places, connections’ (Ashgate, 2011). She is currently editor of Urban Geography and on the Board of Trustees of the IJURR Foundation She is also on the editorial boards of Antipode, Digital Geography and Society, and Society and Space.