Email id: jsundaresan at iihs dot ac dot in
Jayaraj Sundaresan is a consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements – India’s first prospective National Innovation University addressing the challenges of urbanisation through an integrated programme of education, research, consulting and advisory services.
Education:
Jayaraj is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in Urban and Regional Planning Studies at LSE, UK.
Jayaraj is a comparative urbanist with 12 years of work experience in various areas of architecture, urban design and planning in India and in the UK.
In UK, Jayaraj consults with the local government in London on economic regeneration, urban design and planning policy. He has worked as economic regeneration project manager at the London Borough of Haringey, and as senior urban design officer with London Borough of Lewisham. was also a research associate with the Urban Age research Program at the LSE (now LSE Cities) during the Mumbai conference.
Jayaraj has been a graduate teaching assistant at LSE since 2006. He teaches various courses including ‘Planning for sustainable cities’, ‘Historical and Cultural geography of London’, ‘Development in the South’ and ‘Foundations of Social and Spatial research methods’.
In India, Jayaraj was the co-founder and director of C-Earth (Centre for Environment Architecture and Human settlements) in Kerala, where he was involved in a variety of projects on urban poverty reduction, urban design and master planning, heritage conservation and architecture. He was advisor to the local government of Kochi on land management and a key consultant to the Kochi Urban Poverty Alleviation Department (DFID funded) for the design and implementation of slum rehabilitation projects for more than 750 people (2001-04). He was also involved as a consultant with the UNESCO award wining Arackal Palace (Kannur) conservation project for the Kerala government’s department of tourism. He was a lecturer in architecture at the National Institute of Technology in Calicut (2001-03). Jayaraj has worked on heritage conservation projects in Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Udaipur. Earlier, as a research associate at the CEPT, he had worked on a monograph on morphological and typological survey of Indian cities and Indian Urban spaces (2000). After the Gujarat earthquake, Jayaraj participated in the restoration and rehabilitation efforts and published a campaign paper on restoration strategy for small and medium villages of Bachao in Kutchh for the NGO Citizens Initiative.
Jayaraj’s interests lie in the interface between planning, design, policy and institutional and cultural processes. In particular, in the relationship between the practice of the spatial with the practice of social, economic, political, environmental and so on. Theoretically he is particularly interested in the questions of power.
Badminton is his passion; he trains currently at the London Badminton Academy and plays the Badminton England League matches.
Conference papers