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. In his research and teaching, he deploys geographical political economic approaches to examine uneven spatial development in two broad areas of interest:

• Infrastructures and urban environment change in Global South cities
• Transnational South-South economic and financial interdependencies

Siddharth’s first book draws on two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across India and the Persian Gulf to examine how the changing built environment of Kochi city in Kerala – through the production of “world-class” infrastructures – intersects with wider circuits of transnational remittance investments from Gulf-based Indian diasporas, construction worker migration from the Bengal delta, and sand extraction from the Western Ghat mountains in southwest India.

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. His research trajectory builds on a decade of architectural training and professional practice in India’s construction industry where he used sustainable building technologies – like earth and bamboo – to address issues of poverty, inequality, and environmental change.

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