Ruchi Varma is a sustainable urban development practitioner committed to people centric approaches to development, grounded in the principles of Sustainable Development Goals and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. An architect-urban designer by training, she has twelve years of experience in research, academia and practice across multiple urban projects of various scales in India, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, South Korea and Ghana. With an interdisciplinary skill set across program strategy and development, urban data strategy and information system design, capacity building with urban local bodies, she looks at sustainability in cities with two approaches – design driven and data driven.
She has received multiple awards for her academic excellence and has won national and international design competitions. She has been associated with Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) at Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi and Politecnico di Milano, Italy sustainable urban transport initiatives, city regeneration strategies and public realm in cities. Globally selected as the 2018 Dalai Lama Fellow, her work focuses on unpacking approaches to humanize urban spaces for children, with children and co-creating safer and compassionate cities. She is Niti Ayog’s Atal Innovation Mission ‘Mentor of Change’ and a 2017 LEAD India Fellow.
A flaneur at heart, she loves travelling, exploring cities, public spaces and their everyday life.