Speakers
Adnan Zillur Morshed, author of Spatial (In)Justice: How Does It Manifest in the Built Environment? is in conversation with architect Prem Chandavarkar and social anthropologist Carol Upadhya.
Together they examine how justice and space intersect, producing different meanings for different constituencies. From Aristotle and Kant to John Rawls and Amartya Sen, from Rural Studio to Planet of Slums, from Black Lives Matter to sustainability initiatives: they ask what three decades of theoretical debates and design activism have actually produced.
If spatial justice is achieved in the built environment, what might such a space look and feel like? And who gets to decide?
Speakers
Adnan Zillur Morshed
Adnan Zillur Morshed is an architect, architectural historian, urban theorist, and tenured professor at the Catholic University of America, Washington DC. He holds a PhD and master’s in architecture from MIT, and has served as a Fulbright Specialist (2021–2025), Wyeth Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, and Verville Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. His research spans global histories of architecture, spatial justice, urban poverty, and ecological urbanism. His books include Impossible Heights (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Dhaka Delirium (2023), and Spatial (In)Justice (Wiley, 2026). He was featured in the documentary Louis Kahn’s Tiger City (2019), has served as a TEDx speaker, and is a columnist for The Daily Star, Bangladesh. He was founder-director of the Centre for Inclusive Architecture and Urbanism at BRAC University, Dhaka, and curated the exhibition Architecture as Freedom at the AIA District Architecture Center, Washington DC, in 2023.
Prem Chandavarkar
Prem Chandavarkar is Managing Partner of CnT Architects, one of Bengaluru’s first architectural practices. A former Executive Director of Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design & Technology, he serves as academic advisor and guest faculty at architecture schools in India and abroad, and is a member of the Advisory Council of The Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum, USA. He writes and lectures on architecture, urbanism, philosophy, education, environment, art, spirituality, and cultural studies.
Carol Upadhya
Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist and Honorary Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, where she heads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Her latest publication is Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru (University of Minnesota Press, 2024; Yoda Press, 2025). She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (OUP, 2016), and her forthcoming monograph on the Amaravati project will be published by Berghahn Books in 2026. She is also co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Development.
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