Prof. Ayona Datta is a Professor in the Department of Geography at University College, London. She has a background in architecture, environmental design, and planning with cross-cutting expertise in postcolonial urbanism, smart cities, urban futures, and gender citizenship in the global South. She uses interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, planning, feminist and urban geography, combining qualitative, digital/ mapping and visual research methods to examine how urban futures are imagined, governed and lived in the present.  

Prof. Datta is author of The Illegal City: Space, law, and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement 2012), co-editor of Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, connections (2011) and Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias (2016).

She is also editor of Urban Geography journal and is on the editorial boards of the journals Antipode: Digital Geography and Society and EPD: Society and Space. She is a public scholar and engages with audiences through blogs, podcasts, radio interviews, and op-eds. She is also producer/director of two films City Bypassed and City Forgotten and co-producer of a hip-hop song Khadar ki Ladkiyan. She was awarded the Busk Medal from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in 2019 for her contributions to the understanding of smart cities through fieldwork.