Dr Ayona Datta Professor in Urban Futures in King’s College London

Dr Ayona Datta is the author of ‘The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement’ (2012) and co-editor of ‘Translocal geographies: Spaces, places, connections’ (Ashgate, 2011) and ‘Mega-urbanization in the global South: Fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state’ (Routledge, 2017). She also co-edited book, ‘Postcolonial Utopias: Histories of the urban future’ with Manchester University Press.

Ayona is a journal editor of Dialogues in Human Geography and Urban Geography and on the editorial boards of Antipode; Gender, Place and Culture; and Society and Space. She is also a publicly engaged scholar with a strong media presence and maintains a personal blog, The city inside out. She is regularly invited to international lectures and keynotes, including several meetings of the UN at their headquarters in Geneva and New York.

She has a first degree in Architecture (Delhi), an MPhil in Environmental Design (Cantab.) and a PhD in Environmental Design and Planning (Arizona State University).