Anant is a geographer with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His research and teaching interests center on questions of urbanization and globalization from the South Asian vantage point. He is currently the Co founder and Executive Director of Hyderabad Urban Lab, a multi-disciplinary research center. He is widely published in national and international academic journals on social movements, politics of development, and urbanization

At HUL, Swastik is responsible for most of the design-related work and planning, as well as provides strategic direction to HUL’s capacity building program, called the HUL School.

Swastik is an urban development and capacity building expert with more than 22 years of experience, with expertise in land and housing for the urban poor, design and the development sector, public healthcare systems and climate change. He has worked closely with the public, private, non-profit and academic sectors on practice, pedagogical and research projects. His portfolio includes research and research methods, evidence-based practice and policy-making, and pedagogy for practitioners.

Swastik is trained as an architect from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. He started his career co-founding Anagram Architects, an architecture design consultancy based in Delhi, and led and served as faculty for architecture design studios in several architecture colleges. He worked independently between 2004 and 2010, providing architectural and design services to a variety of clients including art professionals, multinational manufacturing firms, and individuals, on projects that included apartments, houses, factories and several art installations. From 2010 to 2020, Swastik worked with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), where for 4 years he led the Urban Practitioners’ Programme (UPP), IIHS’s capacity building and training function, the Design Lab, which focuses on architecture in the development sector, and co-led the urban housing research and practice team. Swastik’s research has been published in leading international and national journals. His consultancy reports and policy analyses are referred to by clients from various sectors.

He is also a keen technologist, with expertise in open source operating systems, several analytical and production-oriented software as well as geo-spatial platforms. He has made several short films on development sector practices and has also been a theatre professional with over a decade’s experience. He is an avid reader of ancient and modern history, and science fiction, and has motorcycle solo across large swathes of India.
Swastik is also the director of Swastik Harish and Associates and a Board Member of the Shelter Square Foundation, Ahmedabad.

Teja specializes in applying spatial data science techniques to monitor changes in the urban environment, measure spatial inequalities, and to reduce disaster risks. His current work and research focuses on understanding the evolving nature of disaster risk due to changes in hazards, exposure and vulnerability particularly in urban areas. He and his team have developed open-source methods and tools for mapping homogeneous neighborhoods, street hierarchy, spatial inequalities, and flood mapping at scale.

Teja holds a Master’s Degree in Geo-Information Sciences (GIS) and Earth Observation (EO) with a specialization in natural hazards and disaster risk management, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Map Solve AI Private Limited. From 2013 – 2021, Teja worked with Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), where he led the IIHS Geospatial Lab, the centre for spatial research, consulting, and capacity building activities at IIHS, and he worked as Senior Practice Consultant with the Urban Risk and Resilience team. He leads a team of multidisciplinary researchers with expertise in geoinformatics, statistics, image processing, computer vision, machine learning and cartographic design. Prior to IIHS, he worked as a Fellow at People in Centre, Ahmedabad where he worked on projects related to capacity building for disaster safe construction, post disaster reconstruction and rehabilitation.

Eesha Kunduri is a Visiting Researcher at Hyderabad Urban Lab. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN) and a Mellon scholar at the Interdisciplinary Institute for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) at UMN. Her dissertation work investigates how digital labour platforms in India are reshaping social structures, worker subjectivities, and local politics of resistance and solidarity. Before joining the PhD programme at UMN, Kunduri worked at a New Delhi-based think tank, the Centre for Policy Research from 2015-19, researching issues of work, migration, and housing in metropolitan and small cities in India. Her work has been published in South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), and Urbanisation.

Anil has over six years of experience in programme management in the development sector, with a background of 10 years in the hospitality sector. He was previously with the Urban Practitioners’ Programme (UPP), the capacity building function of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, where he comprehensively managed training programmes and events around most of the national urban schemes and missions, working with more than a dozen states and hundreds of cities.

He was responsible for liaison, outreach, planning and scheduling courses in collaboration with the faculty, managing the course experience and operations, conducting field visits, managing receivables, budgets and expenses of the projects, vendors, procurement and business development activities. He was able to convert his experience into teaching sessions on project management which he taught within administrative modules of many programmes. He has also previously worked with hospitality brands like Marriott, Accor and Taj Hotels, picking up valuable knowledge in customer service, within and managing teams from diverse backgrounds.

At HUL, Anil is responsible for programme management, overall office administration, business development, outreach, and all institutional operations.

Nivedita is an ecologist and educator. She has a bachelor’s degree in communications (2018) from the University of Delhi and a master’s degree (2020) from the School of Human Ecology at Ambedkar University Delhi. Prior to joining HUL, Nivedita worked for three years with the forest bureaucracy at the state level and at the central level in Delhi. Her research interests are urban ecology and geography, evolutionary biology, environmental history, and science and technology studies.

At HUL, Nivedita is building our urban ecology and nature education programme – Project Critterabad. The project aims to help Hyderabadis (particularly children) cultivate the art of noticing “critters” – plants, animals, fungi, slime molds, rocks, communities, individuals. Nivedita is studying issues in the city through an ecological lens, and helping people un-layer and articulate their ideas and questions around the environment. Underlying Critterabad are the questions – Why have city dwellers lost the ability to notice and reflect? How can we rebuild this capacity?

At HUL, he is interning in media and internal archives, crafting content for social platforms and maintaining documentation. Also, contributing to urban informatics, focusing on disaster management, child-friendly neighbourhoods, and data repository development.

He holds a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. Additionally, he was an Urban Fellow with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, in 2018-19. His previous work involves practices and research concerning affordable housing and community development.

He is currently interning at HUL, where he is actively involved in the i’Local projects. This initiative seeks to revitalize neglected urban areas and transform them into vibrant community hubs. By applying his architectural expertise, Aniruddh is designing these spaces to be both interactive and contextually relevant, ensuring they cater to the specific needs of the local community. In addition to his work on i’Local, he is also designing HUL’s merchandise.