Lalitha Kamath is trained as an urban planner and policy analyst. She teaches in the Centre for Urban Policy & Governance, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research interests centre on questions of urbanization, urban governance and planning, urban politics, and informality. As an urbanist, she has written on the politics and uneven impacts of urban governance and infrastructure projects. She has also engaged with questions of public participation and citizen collective action in governance and urban planning in her writing and through membership in different city collectives.

Her first book was a co-edited volume titled Participolis: Consent and Contention in Neoliberal Urban Governance that focused on a critical exploration of emerging discourses and practices of “citizen participation” that have become part of urban governance reforms and infrastructure projects in India. She has developed this theme by studying dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments. She employs a ‘more than neoliberalism’ framework to examine both structural/slow violence and the specific kinds of displacements it enacts that break and dissolve notions of ‘community’ but also the new forms of politics and urban subjectivities that emerge from this interplay.

Since 2017, she has been engaged in ethnographic work in fishing communities on Mumbai's east coast to understand changing conceptions of urban climates, habitation, labour and value at the water's edge.