Rashee Mehra

Rashee Mehra is an urban geographer by training. Her work began in the informal settlements of Delhi in 2009 on the issues of housing and its allied rights. She was part of the setting up of a non-profit organisation in 2011. The organisation continues to work on providing non-formal education for at-risk children living in informal settlements in Patna and Nalanda. For over 15 years, Rashee has been part of numerous non-profit organisations and city-level networks that address themes of urban inequalities such as housing, urban planning and gender justice.

Rashee’s journey as a researcher began when she joined the IIHS School of Human Development at IIHS in 2019. She transitioned from working as a community worker to a researcher with the goal of bridging the gap between academics and practice to enable a form of scholarship that is embedded in community-held knowledge(s). She is passionate about research that is co-produced with and for community-led action for social justice. Through her research, she hopes to understand how communities, social movements and urban networks can become social infrastructures in the delivery of human rights and social protection to citizens in Indian cities.

To build on this research at IIHS, Rashee has been a part of the Main Bhi Dilli campaign (www.mainbhidilli.com), a citizen campaign to make the upcoming 2041 Master Plan of Delhi more representative and inclusive. The emphasis is on engaging citizens and geographies that have been historically excluded from traditional forms of city-making in the process of the master plan. She has also worked on understanding the relief work that community-based organisations did in Delhi and other urban centres in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, Rashee now also works on building capacities and leadership of residents of informal communities in Delhi on housing and its allied rights. As part of the faculty of the Urban Fellows Programme, Rashee has been teaching a course called ‘Activism and the City’ since 2022.

Rashee received the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Chevening Scholarship to pursue her master’s at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).