Priyanka Salunkhe

Priyanka Salunkhe is an architect and urbanist whose work lies at the intersection of design, infrastructure, and spatial justice. Her practice primarily focuses on exploring alternative approaches to infrastructure design that builds on existing ways of living, accommodates diverse everyday practices, and reimagine their relationships with urban infrastructure.

Before joining MIT, she worked in Bengaluru, India, where she founded Durasti (meaning "repair" in Kannada), an initiative advancing community-led resilience in water-adjacent settlements through the repair of both physical infrastructure and governance systems. Her research at MIT, guided by Professor Lawrence Vale, draws on the framework of design-politics to examine how infrastructure projects produce spatial regimes that enable powerful actors to dispossess communities and impose singular territorial logics. She is also the co-founder of Synergy, a design company incubated at MIT DesignX that explores new approaches to energy infrastructure and the clean energy transition.

Priyanka holds a Bachelor of Architecture from CEPT University, India. She was an exchange scholar at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India.