Melissa Smith

Melissa Smith is an architect and urban planner based in Ahmedabad, India, and founding partner of BandukSmith Studio. 

Melissa completed Master of Architecture  and Master of City & Regional Planning degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, where she was a John K. Branner Fellow in 2010. She completed her BA with concentrations in German, Asian Studies and Art History from Calvin College, Michigan, USA. She is currently the Program Chair for the Bachelor of Urban Design program at at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, and teaches in the Architecture and Planning faculties there. Her interests, explored through the investigation of the incremental, unplanned transformation of aging modernist planned cities, and continued through the examination of settlement formation in India, follow how inhabitants tend to restructure their built environments over time, with an eye toward how these unplanned, recurring interventions could inform design processes for the public realm.