Melissa Smith is an architect and urban designer based in Ahmedabad, India, and founding partner of BandukSmith Studio. She believes in the reparative potential of architecture and works to put this into practice across a wide array of project, building and site types. 

She holds Master of Architecture and Master of City & Regional Planning degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a John K. Branner Fellow in 2010, and investigated the incremental, unplanned transformation of ageing modernist planned cities in a project that included Chandigarh, Brasilia and New Belgrade, as well as several other mid-twentieth century cities around Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. She completed her BA with concentrations in German, Asian Studies and Art History from Calvin College, Michigan, USA. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and generally follow how inhabitants tend to restructure their built environments over time, tracking how these interventions could inform design processes for the public realm. This has led her to explore associated fields in architecture and planning, and she has written about research in building science, craft and construction, and incremental and cyclical processes of settlement formation. Her work has been published in journals in the United States and India, and as part of the Hong Kong, Venice, London and Versailles Biennales.

At CEPT University, where Ms. Smith has been teaching in the Architecture and Planning faculties since 2011, she served as the founding Program Chair to establish the first Bachelor of Urban Design program India. She has ongoing projects investigating the incremental, unplanned transformation of aging modernist planned cities, vacant land parcels in dense South Asian cities, codes of negotiation in Indian urban everyday spaces, and strategies for climate adaptation in informal settlements across the hot dry climate of Gujarat.