Biography

Alokeparna specializes in the field of urban mobility, inclusive mobility design and political ecology of urban transport. She looks at transportation and physical mobility through intersectional lenses of design, sociology, and geography.

She received her Ph.D. from Dipartimento Architettura e Studi Urbani (DAStU) at Politecnico di Milano, Italy and researched the socio-spatial impacts on non-transport land use of a mega-transport project in the context of Delhi. She has an in-depth understanding of qualitative research methods as applied to public spaces, livelihood + mobility choices and stakeholder consultation. She has engaged in fieldwork within urban peripheral communities to study matters of dislocation, re-settlement, and disrupted mobility narratives. Additionally, she also researched the changes and delays in the construction timeline of a high-end housing project in response to the growth and development of the transport project. Alokeparna is passionate about teaching and views the classroom as a dynamic space for intersectional knowledge production. Since the last five years she has been actively developing pedagogical methods using an integrated approach of technical and humanities-based tools and techniques for teaching and learning of various aspects of urban transport, mobility, and public spaces. She has developed and taught seminar courses such as Space and Place, Audits and Assessments, Community Mobilities and Access, Society and Health and studio courses such as Physical Mobility Atelier.

The Physical Mobility Atelier teaches fieldwork and research based content and urban design-based content every alternate semester. She truly believes in bringing rigour into classroom and post-covid has been attempting to combine rigour with compassion as a way of working with students. She finds much happiness in teaching and training students to become meaningful future practitioners.

Alokeparna enjoys walking through the narrowest of alleys, on wide roads, flyovers, foot over bridges as ways of experiencing varied streetscapes. Inclusion and equity are important for her, and she tries to incorporate them in her daily life as well as her work. In her free time, apart from walking, she also enjoys watercolour painting, baking cakes and playing with her dog-daughter Olive.