ProfessorTooran Alizadeh

Professor Tooran Alizadeh is an intersectional feminist from the Global Majority - born, raised, educated, and practised in Southern cities as a built environment professional. She, nevertheless, acknowledges two decades of living, studying, and working on the unceded lands of the First Nations people in Australia. Her ongoing research spans smart urbanism, digital geographies, infrastructure, and Southern urbanism.

Tooran has an established track record on the equity implications of telecommunication infrastructure in Australia, as the first academic who demonstrated the ups and downs of the National Broadband Network (NBN) with attention to the spatial patterns of the mixed-technology NBN rollout. More recently, however, she has advanced an intersectoral approach towards infrastructure arguing for an integrated public-led infrastructure governance in Australia and beyond - laying the foundation for mutually respectful coexistence of the Western urban planning governance and Indigenous governance. This distinct line of inquiry builds solidarity with Indigenous sovereignties while making significant contribution to urban studies.

A second prominent research trajectory focuses on the global trends of smart urbanism from a 'Southern urban critique' - defining 'South' not as a location, but as a power relation that has long been used to silence and sideline. In this line of inquiry, Tooran has increasingly adopted an intersectional feminist lens to investigate the socio-spatial implications of smart city development and unfolding digital geographies in India - as part of a broader research agenda 'the right to the smart city in the Global South' to 1) 'expose' in the sense of analysing and articulating the roots of smart city shortcomings; 2) 'propose' in the sense of working with those affected or excluded to construct normative alternative visions for 'just smart city'; and 3) 'politicise' in the sense of clarifying the political implications of what is exposed and proposed, and supporting, organising, and mobilising around the alternative visions.

Tooran's research is supported by a variety of funding sources (including an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship), has resulted in over 100 refereed publications, and made meaningful contribution to the public discourse around the urban and equity implications of infrastructure development in Australia and beyond - evidenced by numerous prime time TV and radio interviews, and hundreds of quotations in the print media. She is also the Associate Editor of Telematics and Informatics - an interdisciplinary high impact journal on the social impacts of new technologies. Tooran was the co-convener of Smart Urbanism (Research) Lab at the University of Sydney (2021-2025), the lead investigator on the Infrastructure Governance Incubator (2020-2024) funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust, and a recipient of the prestigious Research Accelerator (SOAR) Fellowship at the University of Sydney (2019 and 2020).