Siddharth Menon

Dr. Siddharth Menon (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Urban Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

He uses geographical political-economic frameworks to examine two broad research areas:

• Urban environmental change and urban ecologies in global South cities
• Transnational economic and cultural connections between global South regions.

Siddharth’s first book project draws on two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in India and the Arabian/Persian Gulf to examine how the changing built environments of city-regions in Kerala, south India - through the production of "world-class" infrastructures - intersect with wider circuits of transnational capital investments mediated by Indian Ocean cultures, subnational labour migration fuelled by uneven regional development, and rural resource extraction shaped by colonial plantation logics in the climate change era.

Siddharth holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has received fellowships from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. This research builds on a decade of architectural training and professional practice in India where he used sustainable building technologies, like earth and bamboo, to address issues of uneven development and environmental justice.

Selected publications

Menon, S. (2025). Sand, Plantation Urbanism, and the Extended Political Ecology of Infrastructures in India. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 49(6): 1281-1301. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13363

Menon, S. (2025). Dubai Diasporas, Transnational Remittances, and Intimate Infrastructures of Finance in India. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 57(6): 719–738. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X251344129

Menon, S. (2023). Class, Caste, Gender, and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India. Antipode, 55(2), 574-598. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12898

Rehman, N., Parikh, A., Lamb, Z., Syal, S., Ghertner, D. A., Menon, S., Anwar, N., Nabi, H., Butt, W., Ranganathan, M., Srinivasan, K., Bhat, H., Powis, A., & Anand, N. (2023). South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 47(4), 667–687. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13173