Aarthi Janakiraman and Mariama N'Diaye Present at ACSP 2024
From left to right: Mariama N'Diaye, Chris Zegras, Aarthi Janakiraman
In November of 2024, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) held their annual conference in Seattle Washington. In addition to panels and paper presentations, two DUSP alumna were recognized for their extraordinary work. Aarthi Janakiraman (MCP '19, PhD '24) was awarded the Gill-Chin Lim Award for the Best Dissertation on International Planning and Mariama N'Diaye (MBA ‘24, MCP ‘24) was awarded the 2024 Don Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice.
Janakiraman’s dissertation, Repurposing Colonialism: Postcoloniality and the Politics of World Heritage, investigated the role of colonial-era World Heritage in postcolonial societies focusing on cities in the Indian Ocean Region. The award selection committee shared, her “dissertation brings together scholarship on urban design with critical heritage studies and international development to conduct a transnational comparative study of colonial-era World Heritage sites in South and Southeast Asia. Through two primary case studies, using semi-structured interviews, field observations, critical spatial and visual methods, as well as document and media analysis, the dissertation unpacks how the inequities and power structures of postcolonial societies are preserved through urban conservation. Janakiraman’s research has broad implications on conservation planning and understanding the role of heritage experts in planning."
Janakiraman is an Assistant Professor of Preservation and Urbanism in the School of Architecture at Tulane University. Her research explores the spatial politics of heritage conservation, with a particular focus on the global program of World Heritage within cities in the Global South. At its core, her work examines the relationship between the built environment and social justice through the lens of heritage. The Gill-Chin Lim Award for the Best Dissertation on International Planning recognizes superior scholarship in a doctoral dissertation completed by a student enrolled in an ACSP-member school.
Read Janakiraman’s full dissertation
N'Diaye was recognized for her work on her thesis, The Civic Design Room: Conversations on What It Looks Like To Operationalize Design in Government, With Community, Within Government, and Your Team. "N’Diaye’s Master’s thesis is an excellent example of a critical grounded theory approach to understanding and supporting the learning process on design thinking for planning and public service practitioners. Her iterative approach drew upon podcast interviews with urban planners and designers, and her own reflections on both the interviews and her own personal history. Through both sharing the podcasts, and acknowledging their potential to resonate with, and to further shape the planning process, N’Diaye’s thesis provided a promising illustration of how we might continue to advance reflexive approaches to planning," shared Award Committee Chair Laura Tate, Simon Fraser University.
Currently N'Diaye is the Innovation Team Director for the City of Atlanta as part of the Bloomberg American Sustainable Cities Initiative. The Don Schön Award is given in memory of Donald Schön and in honor of his seminal work on the reflective nature of creative planning practice. Since 1998, this award has recognized a paper written for a graduate course in planning, a master's thesis, or a research report which shows excellence in the writer’s personal and/or professional learning from practice and in the analysis of that learning.