Dr Pratichi Chatterjee

Profile

I am a researcher in human geography. My research explores the drivers, justifications, and the consequences of infrastructure building and housing redevelopments. It is interested in the robustness and legitimacy of the justifications and the social and economic rationales that guide them, as well as the uneven impacts for different sets of people. My work draws on writing from urban geography, critical legal studies and settler colonialism.

Research interests

I currently work on a project funded by ESRC, Prefabs Sprouting: Modern Methods of Construction and the English Housing Crisis. The project brings together researchers in housing studies, sociology, geography, architecture and construction management. It aims to understand what kinds of homes and places MMC firms are building, and the role of MMC, or the role it can play, in addressing the housing crisis.

I have a strong interest in research on race and racial inequality. I have done work on this topic in a non-academic research context with the charity Crisis, setting up a project to understand how systemic inequalities shape people’s access to housing.

My PhD, based in Sydney, Australia, focussed on how planning law, property and the ongoing political context of settler-colonialism shaped two large projects in the city, one of public housing redevelopment and the other of road construction. The work analysed people’s experiences of change and dispossession, which were influenced by factors such as race, socio-economic status, uneven access to resources and the different relationships they held with land (both legal title and unofficial connections). In particular, it looked at such experiences through the lens of time, where long drawn out processes of construction, land acquisition and and disempowering consultation processes negatively impact every-day life for extended periods.

Publications     

• Chatterjee, P., Sisson, A., Condie, J., Wynne, L., Lewis, C., & Skipper, C. 2021. Documentary  and resistance: There Goes Our Neighbourhood, #WeLiveHere2017 and the Waterloo estate  redevelopment. International Journal of Housing Policy https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2020.1851636.
• Urzedo, D. and Chatterjee, P. 2021. The Colonial Reproduction of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Violence Against Indigenous Peoples for Land Development. Journal of Genocide    Research, 23: 2, pp. 302-324.
• McGuirk, P., Dowling, R., & Chatterjee, P. 2021. Municipal statecraft for the smart city: retooling  the smart entrepreneurial city? Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0308518X211027905.
• Chatterjee, P., Condie, J., Sisson, A., & Wynne, L. 2019. Imploding Activism: Challenges and Possibilities of Housing Scholar-Activism. Radical Housing Journal, 1:1, pp. 189-204. https://radicalhousingjournal.org/2019/imploding-activism/
• Sisson, A., Wynne, L., Condie, J. & Chatterjee, P. Overcoming over- research: ethical and methodological reflections from Sydney’s ‘petri dish’. In G. Aiken & C. Button (Eds.), Over Researched Places. Routledge.

Professional memberships

• Royal Geographical Society