Ananya Roy – The Urban Planner

Happy Birthday to Ananya Roy – The scholar and professor at UCLA

Ananya Roy is a professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Ananya Roy was born on 22 January 1970 in Kolkata. And previously she was the only faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Master’s in City Planning (1994) and PhD in Urban Planning (1999).  Ananya Roy is inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA. This institute promotes research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and seeks to build power to make social change.

Ananya’s research and scholarship focus on poverty and inequality. Her work is centered upon urban transformations and land grabs in the global South as well as on global capital. It also focuses on predatory financialization. With feminist thoughts and critical race studies, Ananya Roy is concerned with challenging the world view centred on western countries in urban studies. She also cares about forging theory and pedagogy attentive to historical differences.

Ananya leads a National Science Foundation funded research network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities. This foundation builds a shared terrain of scholarship across universities and movements. This network is concerned with advancing ideas, programs, practices, and policies of housing justice in Los Angeles as well as in other cities of the world.

Ananya’s research is all about “racial banishment”. She is trying to spread the working communities of color across the country to all the far peripherals. Also, since 2017, she has been actively involved in scholarships about sanctuary cities and cities of refuge. A sanctuary city is a city whose municipal laws tend to protect unauthorized immigrants from deportation or prosecution, despite federal immigration law.

Ananya now serves as editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Ananya is the recipient of several awards including the Paul Davidoff book award, the Distinguished Teaching Award.  She was named “California Professor of the Year,” and in 2011, Ananya received the Excellence in Achievement award of the Cal Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement award that celebrated her contributions to the University of California and the public sphere.

We wish Ananya a very happy birthday on this day and will look forward to an even brighter future for her.

-Written by Poorna Krishnan