Susmita Rishi, Ph.D

Rishi Associate Professor
Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning

2096 Seaton Hall | 920C N. Martin King Jr. Drive
Manhattan, KS 66506
T: (785) 532-5961

As an engaged urban scholar, my work challenges and reconceptualizes hegemonic epistemologies (theories of knowledge), and pedagogies (methods and practices of teaching) that undergird the overarching fields of urban and built environment studies. I received my doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2019. I also hold a master’s in architecture with a focus on Urban and Community Design from Pennsylvania State University.

My research and scholarship lie at the intersection of housing, social production of home, informality, and southern theory. My ongoing research in India, investigates residents’ use, appropriation and understandings of their spaces in informal housing, to expand the knowledges on which planning decisions are made. As an engaged scholar, I try to understand space, particularly the space of the home from the perspective of marginalized urban residents. Extending this focus to the US context, the first phase of my project “Double-Wide Lives: realities of chasing the American dream in its mobile home parks [MHPs]” was awarded the KState University Small Research Grant (USRG) 2023. Collaborating (as co-PI) with colleagues on housing has resulted in a pre-proposal acceptance for a $1 Million NSF Innovation engines project titled “Net-Positive Housing Regional Innovation Consortium”. In collaboration with Dr. Mariana Junquiera and Prof. Michael Gibson, I received the inaugural APDesign Engagement Champions Award 2024 through which we have established the Better Housing Consortium. In recognition of my engaged work, I was selected as a fellow under the 2023-25 Deans’ Equity and Inclusion Initiative (DEII) funded by the Mellon Foundation.

My pedagogical philosophy, inspired by my experience as an architect and urban designer as well as an engaged qualitative researcher, is about equipping students with practical skills, critical analytic abilities, theoretical depth, reflexivity, and ethics to foster just and socially sustainable cities. I emphasize active critical inquiry and personal reflection using the urban region, as a laboratory. In many of my courses, this takes the form of students participating in contract-funded service-learning projects that facilitate the application of theories and concepts learned in the classroom, to a real-world context, while learning from, and giving back to the communities. Prof. Belanger and I were nominated for the K-State Excellence in Engagement Award 2023 in recognition of the lasting impact that one such project- Reimagining Brownfields on the SE 14th St. Corridor project- had on students and the communities involved. Students were awarded the Kansas APA New Horizon Award 2022 for the Des Moines project and for the Beloit project in 2019. I also serve as a mentor and major professor for RCP Students through their Masters Report/Thesis Projects, two of whom, Lindsey Logan and Abbey Hebbert, have received the ARCC King Student Medals, the highest research award to students in the College and recognized Nationally. In recognition of consistently support and mentoring of graduate students as was evident in the nominations from my students I received the Graduate Faculty Mentor Award 2024 from the Graduate School.

Courses Taught

PLAN215 World Cities

PLAN510 Graphic Composition and Representation for Planning

PLAN640 Urban Design and Development

PLAN703 Report Preparation

PLAN707 Writing and Thinking the City

PLAN897 Proposal Writing

LAR806 Portfolio Design

UHP189 Social Justice and the City