About
Saraja Gantner is a Researcher at LSE Cities with a focus on urban design, architecture and policy communications.
She currently supports the Bloomberg LSE European City Leadership Initiative, contributing to the reporting and leading the editorial production of its yearly compendium — a comparative volume compiling urban indicators, cartographic material and political-economic research across the Initiative's participating cities. She has also served as Project Manager and Researcher on the Shillong Urban Strategy, a research and training programme conducted for the Government of Meghalaya, India, reviewing the city's urban strategy across mobility, design and quality-of-life priorities and culminating in an executive training programme in London for local government officials. Alongside this, she has worked as a Researcher on Typical Mobility Cities, a project comparing cities in England and Germany with the most representative transport profiles, in order to better inform policy for "ordinary" places rather than only unusual ones, co-authoring the accompanying policy brief.
Before joining LSE Cities, Saraja was a Design Associate at Swissnex in India, based in Bangalore, and previously worked as Chargée de projets at Civic City, an urban research institute in Paris. Her earlier career included an internship with SAOTA Architects in Cape Town, roles in event management and hospitality concept development, and a placement in real estate management in her native Switzerland.
Saraja holds an MSc in City Design and Social Science from LSE and a BSc in Architecture from ETH Zurich, complemented by a 400-hour data science certificate. Having lived and worked across Switzerland, the United States, France, South Africa, India and the UK, she brings a design-trained, internationally informed perspective to her research on the built environment.