Dr Mittul Vahanvati
About
Mittul is a senior lecturer in Sustainability and Urban Planning discipline. Her research focuses on the complex relationship between housing recovery after disasters and community resilience, to uphold housing as a human right and enhance its resilience.
Her research focusses on two aspects of housing recovery and community resilience: 1) bridging the short-term shelter needs with longer term disaster resilience, and 2) negotiations between enabling recovery program design and governance by governments, and grass-roots community abilities for risk-informed decision-making. She employs collaborative methods of research, including co-design and knowledge co-production, by engaging with various stakeholders from diverse cultural settings of Australasia and the Pacific. She engages with UN-bodies, including UN-Habitat, UNEP, UNFCCC, national and local government in Australia and the Pacific as well as non-government organisations. She has worked in architectural industry for over 8 years, in India, Switzerland and Australia, after finishing her Bachelor of Architecture from CEPT in India and her Masters in Sustainable Development from UNSW in Sydney, prior to moving into academia in 2012. Her PhD at RMIT University in Melbourne focussed on long-term impacts of owner-driven housing reconstruction programs and projects in India, in terms of community resilience. She is also a co-founder of a design + make social enterprise, Giant Grass. Her architectural industry practice spans across India, Switzerland, Sydney and Melbourne. At RMIT, Mittul leads the design and development of a suit of Urban Design courses, core to Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) accreditation. She co-leads RMIT's Climate Change Transformations Research Group.