A/ProfSumita Ghosh

Sumita Ghosh is an academic who focuses on responsive urban design and spatial planning in the School of Built Environment, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, UTS. As an architect and urban planner, Sumita has more than 30 years of teaching, research and professional experience. She has previously worked for the government, local councils, research organisations and universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Sumita's core area of research is focused on ‘Urban Resilience’ that connects to multiple strands of urban sustainability research. Her research interests focus on green infrastructure planning and policy (urban forestry and local food production); urban morphologies, and climate change impacts and adaptation using spatial GIS and remote sensing applications. Her research explores food urbanism theory and practices in designing and master planning for precincts and creating healthy and sustainable communities.

She has participated in multidisciplinary research projects with various Australian universities and the Foundation for Research Science and Technology (FRST), New Zealand Government on green infrastructure, sustainable settlement modelling and community development practices. She was the Chief Investigator (CI) from UTS in a collaborative research project funded by the Horticulture Australia Limited (HAL) Category 1 grant that investigated Australia's urban forests' carbon benefits and pollution mitigation potential. She participated in the City of Sydney’s Environmental Grant Programme to conduct qualitative social research on rooftop urban food production in the Sydney CBD in Australia. She has been a Chief Investigator from UTS in Landcom's urban transformation project on local foodscapes and placemaking in high densities. She has contributed as a CI in IKEA's project on measuring how households adopting sustainable lifestyles and practices, and solar energy use, could contribute to CO2 emissions savings and residential energy efficiency. Currently, she is working with Achieve Australia's project on mapping Specialist Disability Housing (SDA) in NSW, Australia, and the NSW Department of Education and Training's project on sharing green space.

Sumita teaches urban design, strategic planning, master planning and spatial analysis (using Geographic Information Systems or GIS methods) in the Master of Planning degree at UTS. She also supervises doctoral and postgraduate research students in the School of Built Environment in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at UTS. She has published in peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers. Sumita is the former Director of Higher Degree Research Programs in DAB and the former Course Director of Postgraduate Planning for on-campus planning courses.