Her research interest is in understanding the different trajectories of the production of urban space and the ways in which particular marginalized social groups experience, contribute to and actively resist exclusionary forms of socio-spatial urban transformations. She is particularly interested in examining the street - and the politics and everyday lives of groups that inhabit, work and use the street , the ways in which the street is conceived, planned and governed. In this regard she has worked with street vendors, sex workers, houseless populations as well as radical citizen groups that want to reclaim the street for pedestrians from the rising appropriation of street spaces by cars.

 
Ratoola has also worked in the area of examining the politics of land acquisition and town planning in the production of new towns from the lens of urban informality. Ratoola has been analyzing the socio-spatial transformations of urban peripheries and its concomitant forms of disruption, dispossession, displacements through ethnographic work in New Town, Rajarhat on the eastern margins of Kolkata. Her work, which focuses on the experiences and place-making agencies of native inhabitants of villages that get pulled into the vortex of urbanization contributes to the growing literature on contested modes of peri-urbanization in the cities of the global South, reflecting on questions of infrastructural divides, informal modes of governance and environmental conflicts.

 
An emerging area of research interest for Ratoola are the issues around infrastructure planning, governance and urban development in small towns that are often not on the map of urban studies that is dominated by literature on metropolitan cities and their governance. Along with her PhD students and other scholars, she has worked on small towns across India such as Darjeeling, Ratnagiri, Puri, Baruipur and Srerampore.

Ratoola Kundu and Gopa Samanta (2023) The Social and the City in Review of Urban Affairs, Economics and Political Weekly, Vol 58, Issue 52, https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/52/review-urban-affairs/social-and-city.html

Ratoola Kundu & Shivani Satija (2023) Examining slow and spectacular forms of violence through the politics of redevelopment in Kamathipura, City, 27:3-4, 520-540, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2023.2219572

Ratoola Kundu 2023 Making Sense of Place in Rajarhat New Town: The Village in the Urban and the Urban in the Village, , in India’s Greenfield Urban Future edited by Ashima Sood and Lorraine Kennedy, ISBN 9789354423611, Orient Blackswan Publications.

Kundu R, Chatterjee S. 2021. Pipe dreams? Practices of everyday governance of heterogeneous configurations of water supply in Baruipur, a small town in India. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space; 39(2):318-335. doi:10.1177/2399654420958027

Suchismita Chatterjee & Ratoola Kundu 2020. Co-Production or Contested Production? Complex Arrangements of Actors, Infrastructure, and Practices in Everyday Water Provisioning in a Small Town in India, International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, DOI: 10.1080/19463138.2020.1852408

Reimagining Kamathipura: Creating value from waste in Mumbai Reader 20/21

Authors: Dr. Ratoola Kundu, Dr. Anushyama Mukherjee, Aradhana Paralikar, UDRI MUMBAI, December 2021, ISBN 978-93-81444-09-2

Kundu, Ratoola. "10 NIRMALA KAMATHIPURA’S GATEKEEPER". Bombay Brokers, edited by Lisa Björkman, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 145-153. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478013082-014 Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1149-1

Kundu R. 2017. Inserting Local Agendas in the planning of New Town Rajarhat, in Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias of the Postcolonial State, Routledge e ISBN 9781315797830

Newspaper articles:

Bhide, A and Kundu R. 2022 Developing Kamathipura: Life measured in square feet. In OUTLOOK magazine. Accessible at:

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/national/developing-kamathipura-life-measured-in-square-feet-magazine-184848

Kundu, R. 2020. As hunger grows, Mumbais community kitchens may hold lessons on ensuring nutrition for the urban poor in Scroll.in . Accessible at:

https://scroll.in/article/968612/as-hunger-grows-mumbais-community-kitchens-may-hold-lessons-for-ensuring-nutrition-for-the-poor

Burte, H. A. Bhide, L. Kamath & R. Kundu. 2022. The Quiet Violence of the Remaking of Mumbai. The India Forum. Accessible at:

https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/quiet-violence-remaking-mumbai

Since 2022 she has been part of a multi-institutional collaborative project URBALTOUR [Subaltern Urbanization in Touristic Southern and Eastern Asian mountains] which questions the sustainability of urban spaces , particularly hill towns, constructed by tourism in South and East Asia. This project is funded by French Institute of Pondicherry. Her research is on the rapid and unplanned urbanisation of Darjeeling hill station in the Himalayas, as a result of over-tourism and the impact it has on ecology and livability.

 
From 2022 she has been part of a multi-institutional research consortium, headed by the University of Sydney Australia and University College London, which is conducting a research of the mixed modes of Covtech to enable inclusive, sustainable, and smart cities ( SDG 11) and how cities and citizens in India have used it, been included or excluded by it or navigated around it, with specific focus on vulnerable urban populations such as the houseless in Mumbai. She has been leading the research on Mumbai.

 
Since 2021 she has been a Mentor at the Writing Urban India project which seeks to advice and train young urban researchers in academic writing and publishing their work in international peer reviewed journals.

 
From 2020 to 2022Ratoola has been researching about the impact of COVID 19 on the houseless population across three cities - Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi. She was the Co-PI for the study and the project is funded by GCRF, UK and DPU, London. The study comprises a series of studies of government orders, media reports on the impact and condition of the houseless during COVID, discussions with stakeholders in collaboration with activists, organising webinars and providing key inputs in producing a documentary film on the subject as an Academic Lead.

From 2020 to 2023 she has coordinated the Omidyar Network India funded lecture series, which has also included book discussion, mapping workshops at the Centre. The speakers cut across a wide array of practitioners, experts, academics, activists both at the national and at the international level, discussing alternative strategies to land and housing for the urban poor in cities of the global south.

 
From 2020 to 2021 Ratoola was part of a TISS team researching and carrying out interventions on multiple strands of COVID related impacts on urban vulnerable populations, particularly the invisibilised groups of urban dwellers. As part of this work, she organised data collection and research, design and editing of 12 community stories which described the plight of citizens in informal settlements and how they have actively negotiated, collaborated and self-organised to collectively channel resources for relief operations - particularly food and water during the harsh lockdown in Mumbai city.

 
From 2018 to 2022 she has conducted research on circuits of formal and informal e-waste recycling in Mumbai, with a special focus on the centrally located low income red-light area of Mumbai called Kamathipura. The aim of the research is to understand the kind of tacit and explicit knowledge and rules that frame this work and how people working in these units negotiate the work sphere that is highly exploitative, informalised and precarious. This is part of the TURN project at TISS, in collaboration with HUL, CPR and IIHS.

 
From 2016 to 2018 she has been part of a collaborative research project on the Right to the City, funded by the Ford Foundation. She examined the spatial politics and contestations that are emerging around streets spaces in Kolkata especially amongst the hawkers and walkers with the increase in the number of motorised vehicles on the road. This research attempted to unpack the everyday governance of streets and the work of state and non-state actors in negotiating claims that the informal street vendors make. The project also sought to understand how the state, political parties and civil society are responding to these claims.

 
From 2015 to 2017 she along with Dr. Amita Bhide, conducted a research project on the experience of women in commuting by the Mumbai Suburban Railway network as part of a project called Engendering the Mumbai Suburban Railway Network, funded by the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation. This project sought to enhance accessibility and mobility for women by identifying issues with the train services, design of stations, platforms and coaches, location, intermodal linkages etc. with a special focus on enhancing safety and security.

 
From 2013 to 2016 she was part of a collaborative research project at the Centre of Urban Policy and Governance funded by IDRC called People Places and Infrastructure: Countering Urban Violence and Promoting Spatial Justice in Mumbai, Durban and Rio. Her research centred on the seeming abject apathy of the state towards one of the most centrally located neighbourhoods of Mumbai – Kamathipura and the reasons for the constant failure of redevelopment efforts by the state, the private developers and citizens groups. It traced the incrementally changing socio-spatial fabric of the neighbourhood, particularly the privatisation of public spaces and the livelihood threats to already precarious and marginalised urban groups residing or working in the neighbourhood.

UPG 03: Urban Planning: Challenges and Current Practices
UPG 13: Issues and Challenges in Urban Transport
UPG 18: Planning and the Indian City ( co- taught with Lalitha Kamath)
HS07: Socio-cultural perspectives on Habitat ( co-taught with Manjula Bharathy and Suhas Bhasme)
FC: Contemporary Urban Issues in India

I am involved in teaching the Field Institute as well as guiding MA dissertation students and supervising PhD students.