Champaka Rajagopal is a senior researcher, educator, practitioner, focused on urban policy, governance, planning and infrastructure governance. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, India, Professor Affiliae at the Urban School, SciencesPo, Paris, France, Founder, Director of The Entrepreneurship and Partnerships Lab. She also serves as Trustee on the Board of Trustees, IJURR Foundation, UK.
Her research interests lie in investigating state-business relationships, firms, entrepreneurship and innovation, with a focus on commercial and contract laws, policies, governance, mechanisms directed at privatisation. She draws on experiential learning from her more than two decades of engagement with multi-national corporations and international finance institutions, in India and abroad.
Previously, as part of international consultancy firms, she co-led large statutory plans, including the Draft Development Plan for Greater Mumbai 2034 and Revised Master Plan 2015, Bangalore, where the focus was to remove regulatory rigidity and regulatory capture. In her two decades of practice across cities in the global South and the North, with international donors, national-state governments, businesses, markets and communities she has advanced the design of policies, regulatory processes, instruments and mechanisms that deepen democratic processes and respond to place.
Resulting from practice is her article, Reciprocity as Regulation: Exploring Methodologies in Urban Design for the Historical Pete, Bangalore, published in Ed, Harriss-White, Basile, Lutringer, Mapping India’s Capitalisms, Old and New, Springer, 2015. She has authored book chapters and news articles on problems in urban planning through the years.
Champaka has a doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in Governance, Planning and International Development Studies (2021), a Master’s Degree in Urban Design from the University of California at Berkeley, USA (2002) and an undergraduate degree in the architecture of the built environment from the Centre for Environment Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, India (1997).