Susmita Rishi

Dr. Susmita Rishi joins the Urban and Environmental Planning & Policy (UEPP) program at Western Washington University in fall 2026 as an Assistant Professor. She comes to WWU from Kansas State University, where she was an Associate Professor affiliated with the Master’s of Regional & Community Planning program and Kansas State’s Technical Assistance to Brownfields (TAB) initiative.

Dr. Rishi holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington (2019), an M.Arch from Pennsylvania State University (2008), and a B.Arch from the Chandigarh College of Architecture, Panjab University, India (2006). She was born and raised in Chandigarh — Le Corbusier’s one fully realized master-planned city — an upbringing that shaped her enduring interest in the gap between formal planning and everyday, informally created value.

Dr. Rishi is most interested in how those who are most marginalized in the urban environment navigate and negotiate with the planning apparatus, and the role that land use law and regulation play in that negotiation. That interest is anchored in her ongoing research on eviction and resettlement in Delhi, India — work that grounds a broader interest in planning, informality, and spatial justice across the Global South. It also runs through two further strands of work: research on manufactured home communities, examining the “quasi-homeownership” split between chattel-titled homes and leased land, now extended through a partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on energy equity and climate vulnerability; and a brownfields-to-housing redevelopment strand, funded jointly by her EPA Technical Assistance to Brownfields (TAB) Fellowship and a HUD Housing Policy Research Grant co-led with Dr. Shakil Kashem and Dr. Clemens Pilgram, developing decision-support toolkits for converting brownfield sites into housing.

Dr. Rishi’s work is strongly applied and community engaged. Through EPA’s Technical Assistance to Brownfields program and a multi-year service-learning  course partnering planning students with Midwest communities, she has translated research into practice through toolkits, planner-facing memos, and public-facing dissemination. Her teaching and mentoring have been recognized with two Kansas APA New Horizon Awards (2019, 2022), the Kansas State University Graduate Faculty Mentor Award (2024), and a departmental Faculty Teaching Award (2025).

She currently co-chairs (2024-26) the Global Planning Educators Interest Group within the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), connecting planning scholars across international contexts.

Dr. Rishi has extensive experience teaching courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level and at UEPP, she looks forward to teaching land use and planning law through the lens of implementation and justice, developing coursework on cities and urbanization in the Global South, and building new community and student partnerships across Washington.