DUSP student Priyanka Salunkhe (MCP '27) has been awarded a 2026–2027 Tata Center Fellowship. Her research focuses on design strategies that safeguard water-adjacent communities from displacement in Bengaluru, India, as a rapidly changing climate reshapes the city's lakes and stormwater drains.
Guided by Professor Lawrence Vale's framework of urban design-politics, her work examines how waterscape rejuvenation projects in Bengaluru create spatial regimes that let powerful actors dispossess communities and impose singular territorial logics. Those displaced are frequently the most socially and economically vulnerable, yet their ways of life have long sustained the ecological health of these waters. Using design as a tool for justice, Priyanka's work proposes an alternative vision that builds on how these communities already live, holds their many lived realities together, and re-establishes their relationship with water.
This research is currently featured in the inaugural Occupancy exhibition, under the title "Margins to Mainstream,” at the MET Warehouse in Cambridge, MA. On view through fall 2026.
