Sneha Mandhan

Sneha Mandhan is a PhD Candidate in planning, a course instructor at the Daniels Faculty, a community engagement associate at the Department of Words and Deeds, co-manager/chief editor of the Re:Locations Journal, and a research affiliate with the LCAU. She is an urban planner, urban designer, and architect who has worked on several urban planning, environmental planning, and urban design projects in the U.S. and India.

Through her PhD, she aims to study the influence of "integration" practices on culture and use of space among immigrant communities in Toronto, and to connect their experiences transnationally to their families "back home." Her goal is to develop creative research methodologies, storytelling techniques, and design practices that are geared towards making immigrants feel at home, like they belong, in North American cities.

She is a graduate of the Master in City Planning course at MIT, where she received the Flora Crockett Stephenson Writing Prize for her thesis, "Designing Indian Streets as Social Public Spaces: Contextual design and planning in Bangalore." She has a professional undergraduate degree in architecture from the National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India.

She is interested in the integration of physical form with social and cultural forces within cities, social justice and equity issues, urban informality, community engagement, and spatial planning pedagogy.