Naomi Mehta is an architect from Mumbai, India, currently pursuing her graduate degree in Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She received her undergraduate architecture degree from CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India. She has been a summer fellow at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative where she worked within a US city government to help overcome challenges in federally assisted affordable housing and present equitable development strategies to the city. She enjoys field research and recently conducted heat vulnerability and material studies across public parks in low-income neighborhoods of Monterrey, Mexico, through the Mexican Cities Initiative Grant. She works across different scales, from architectural design to urban policy issues, which she has been actively exploring in different contexts of the world through the lens of climate and social equity. She is the co-founder of Voids.in, a curatorial platform that engages in discourse with designers, policymakers, and practitioners around ideas of “place-based” work in the Indian context. Her current research focus lies at the intersection of climate vulnerability and infrastructures of water and waste in India, investigating the role of design and policy in engaging with it. She is passionate about exploring ways to integrate data-driven research and spatial analysis in mitigating challenges faced by cities of the Global South.
