Smita Rawoot

Smita Rawoot is the Urban Resilience Lead at WRI. She leads a team of researchers and urban development professionals who are focused on helping cities manage and adapt to their climate risks while advancing human & environmental health, economic opportunity and social wellness.

Prior to joining WRI, she was the Associate Director for Global Solution Delivery at 100 Resilient Cities (100RC, now Global Resilient Cities Network), a Rockefeller foundation funded program. At 100RC she led the work of solution design and delivery across 24 North American cities. In this role she worked closely with the City Governments to identify, define, develop and implement priority resilience initiatives. Her work spanned various aspects of resilience planning, including developing community preparedness training programs, multi-hazard risk assessment tools, economic resilience planning methodologies, tactical resilience approaches, disaster recovery finance strategies, and energy and water resilience frameworks. During this period Smita helped the organization develop a project management system to track and monitor solution delivery and a build a searchable database to query and analyze resilience actions across 100 cities. In addition, she developed and launched several multi-city challenges that supported joint problem solving and solution development among a cohort of cities working on similar resilience challenges. 

Smita is an urban planner, architect and urban designer who has worked extensively in the field of planning and design for the past 18 years. Through her design and planning work she has supported the development of inclusive communities with vibrant public realms and environmentally and economically sustainable places. Her experience in spatial planning and design includes developing various residential and education masterplans, and mix-use urban development projects. She has extensive knowledge of land use and zoning regulations, building codes and standards, and has worked extensively in the US and India.  

Smita holds a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Masters in Architecture from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor in Architecture from Sushant School of Arts and Architecture.