Sangeeta Banerji

Sangeeta Banerji is an urban geographer and ethnographer whose research investigates how everyday infrastructures—brokers, fixers, editors, and landlords—mediate access to land, governance, and recognition in rapidly transforming cities of the Global South. She is currently Assistant Professor of Human Geography at NYU Shanghai, where she teaches courses in urban geography, political ecology, and qualitative research methods. Her work brings together critical urban theory, participatory media analysis, and long-term, collaborative ethnographic fieldwork across Mumbai, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

Banerji’s research is grounded in partnerships with local actors and emphasizes the role of mediation in shaping urban life. Her recent article, “Expert Fixers: Bureaucratic Informality, Brokerage, and the Politics of Land in Mumbai” (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2025), brokers operating inside a byzantine urban bureaucracy manipulate and maintain the real estate industry's persistence in Mumbai. A related article, “Māṇḍavlī: Negotiating with Digital Governance in Mumbai” (Urban Geography, 2024), explores how digital complaint platforms transform these mediating roles, often narrowing access to the state for marginalized residents. Finally, “Fixing Bhim Nagar” (City, 2024) examines the para-legal strategies and moral economies of land brokers in Mumbai’s informal settlements.

In Shanghai, her project on Dongming Magazine examines a community publication co-created by residents, NGO staff, and subdistrict officials in the wake of COVID-19. Developed in close collaboration with contributors and editors from the neighborhood, the project shows how analog media can serve as civic infrastructure—enabling emotional proximity, storytelling, and forms of care that supplement formal governance. Her collaborative article, “Voices from Dongming: Analog Media as Infrastructures of Care in Post-COVID19 Shanghai,” will reflect on how these editorial practices build intergenerational memory and civic attachment through everyday forms of labor.

She is also developing a comparative project titled Bridging Rural Roots and Urban Realities: Agrarian Perspectives on Asian City Futures, which examines how agrarian pasts—land tenure, ritual economies, and rural social imaginaries—continue to shape urban transformation in Guangzhou and Mumbai. In Guangzhou, Banerji is conducting oral history interviews in Xiaogang, an urban village undergoing redevelopment, in partnership with a local collaborator and community residents. Her co-authored article “The Happiest People in China” will explore how landless farmer-landlords in Xiaogang make sense of aspiration, precarity, and displacement in a landscape marked by karaoke wealth, migrant tenancy, and fading collectivist memory.

Before entering academia, Banerji worked as an urban planner on the revision of the Mumbai Development Plan 2034, coordinating participatory workshops and contributing to the city's digital land-use database. This hands-on planning experience continues to inform her academic research and classroom pedagogy. She has previously taught at Brown University, Rutgers University, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, where she was also involved in civic efforts to democratize the city’s planning process.

At NYU Shanghai, Banerji integrates ethnographic theory with creative pedagogy—encouraging students to explore urban life through participatory mapping, zine-making, oral history, and storytelling. She also serves as the capstone instructor for the undergraduate research thesis in the Humanities area, mentoring students across diverse fields including geography, philosophy, literature, art history, history, and visual arts. Her supervision supports students in developing long-form, original projects that critically engage with questions of urban life, infrastructure, embodiment, memory, and representation. Across all her work, she is committed to slow, accountable scholarship that centers the knowledge of those who quietly fix, narrate, and care for the city.