About

Mallika Bose is an architect and urban planner with educational credentials from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, and the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, India. She also holds a specialization in environment-behavior studies from Kansas State University and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She serves as a professor and the graduate program coordinator in the Department of Landscape Architecture and is the associate dean for research, creative activity, and graduate studies at the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. Her research focuses on understanding how social structures are embedded within the built environment and how socio-spatial constructions influence the behavior of different societal groups. Bose has been actively involved in research areas including built environment and active living/healthy eating, public scholarship and community-based design, gender and development, and design/planning pedagogy. She has served as the interim director of the Hamer Center for Community Design at Penn State and currently serves on the board of directors of the Environmental Design Research Association, having previously served as its chair. Her scholarly contributions include publications in various academic journals such as the Journal of Architecture and Planning Research, Landscape Journal, Habitat International, and others. She has also co-edited a book on community-engaged teaching and scholarship titled 'Community Matters: Service-learning in Engaged Design and Planning.'

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Geography
• Business
• Economic growth
• Economics
• Environmental science
• Archaeology
• Engineering
• Environmental planning
• Advertising

Selected publications

• “You thrive where you are:” Experiences of neighborhood built environments, mental health and wellbeing among residents of disinvested neighborhoods

  Health & Place · 2026-04-04

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  PublisherDOI

• Unpacking Women's Recreational Spaces: Feminist Perspectives on Recreational Inequality in the Urban Peripheries of Kolkata - Insights from the Pilot Study

  ScholarSphere (Penn State Libraries) · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This pilot study explores how the invisibility of the spatial practices of ordinary women from disadvantaged backgrounds, often considered subaltern, in the urban peripheries of Indian cities perpetuates recreational inequality, with Kolkata as a case study. It aims to understand how the recreational practices and everyday spatial landscapes of subaltern women living under precarious conditions in peripheral, quasilegal settlements have been marginalized in mainstream recreational policies, shaped by upper-middleclass, male-centered approaches in neoliberal Indian cities. Drawing on Lefebvre’s (1976) concept of the production of space and feminist perspectives on contextspecific, subjective meaning-making processes related to recreation (Henderson, 1996; Mohanty, 1988, 2003)we investigate what recreation means to subaltern women and their associated everyday spaces, offering preliminary insights into their everyday recreational landscape. We adopt a participatory ethnographic approach across three contrasting peri-urban neighborhoods in Kolkata to challenge “World-Class City” initiatives that frame recreation as free-time activity in homogenized formal public spaces like parks and commercial places. These policies consider surveillance and aesthetic upgrades as a homogenized planning and design need for women-friendly spaces, while failing to acknowledge grassroots-level knowledge and lived realities. Accessed through municipal connections, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews through snowball sampling and analyzed them with a grounded theory approach. Findings show a comparative analysis of the three areas, revealing that subaltern women’s recreation is shaped by a nuanced interpretation of recreation associated with leisure, embedded in fragmented, everyday activities within informal, self-made spaces across five settings: residences, informal workplaces, neighborhood spaces, religious spaces, and child-centered spaces. Furthermore, these practices are influenced by socio-cognitive needs shaped by social roles, identity, norms, and agency specific to different groups and locations. The study concludes that subaltern women’s recreation is a contested space, where the physical characteristics of spaces require an in-depth understanding of context-specificity, local knowledge, and women-centered lived experiences.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Eliciting resident input using neighborhood assessments, geonarratives, and interviews from an underserved community

  Research Square · 2025-04-30

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hiding access to quality parks: a case study examining Parkserv ^TM and objective park assessment in an under-resourced community

  Cities & Health · 2025-10-11

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• Landscape architecture as democratic practice: learning from participatory methods and motivations in community-engaged design

  Landscape Research · 2024-10-07 · 3 citations

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  To guide and advance participatory and democratic landscape architecture practice, this study investigates the participatory methods and motivations of community-engaged design (CED) practice aligned with the principles of democratic professionalism (DP). A content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 17 experienced scholar-professionals in landscape architecture and related professions whose praxis is rooted in participatory principles (1) identified a toolbox of essential task-sharing methods and strategies based on typical landscape architecture project stages (site analysis/data collection, planning and design, and implementation and post-implementation), and two key themes—relationship-building and communication, and (2) found the principal motivations driving democratic design practices to be empowerment and advocacy, community engagement ethics, and democratising professional paradigm. Task-sharing approaches identified in landscape architecture practice exemplify how DP values can be embedded in all phases of a CED project. This study also affirms the position that landscape architecture as a profession has the potential to advance DP.

  PublisherDOI

• Barriers and strategies to implementing safe routes to school programs within disadvantaged communities: Interviews with state-level representatives

  Journal of Transport & Health · 2024-03-16 · 3 citations

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• Neighborhood Assessment of the Environment for Physical Activity: Engaging Adolescents Within an Under-resourced Community

  Progress in community health partnerships · 2023-12-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Physical activity (PA) participation has many benefits; however, rates of participation remain low, particularly among underserved populations which may face low PA participation due to having poorer quality of built environment factors which is a known influence on activity levels. OBJECTIVES: To train adolescents to conduct environmental neighborhood assessments and neighborhood resident surveys of with the end goal of encouraging advocacy for neighborhood improvements. METHODS: This mixed methods, prospective design study was focused in a low-income, under-resourced, predominately African American neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Adolescents (n = 14; 13-17 years) in a community partner's youth program were trained to conduct neighborhood environmental assessments and distributed neighborhood resident surveys. Results of these assessments were shared with community partners to create strategies for improvement. These adolescents participated in a focus group following the environmental assessments to reflect on their findings and the process. The neighborhood resident survey (n = 123) assessed demographics, perceptions of the neighborhood, PA participation and health outcomes. RESULTS: Neighborhood assessments noted and resident surveys noted many barriers to activity (i.e., poor sidewalks, unsafe areas). Results were informative for our community partner to advocate for neighborhood improvements. Focus group results indicated that the adolescents understood how their neighborhood environment could influence PA and how the findings could be utilized to make improvements in their neighborhood. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescents can be successfully trained/educated to follow a research protocol for assessing the built environment for PA using a variety of measurement tools, while additionally gaining insight towards neighborhood environment advocacy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Who owns the city? Neoliberal urbanism and land purchases in Gurgaon, India

  Urban Studies · 2023-07-14 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Increasing purchases of valuable real estate for storing capital have contributed to the soaring prices of modest housing in many global cities and in several South Asian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Saskia Sassen has drawn attention to the phenomenon of underutilisation of purchased properties existing alongside the acute demand for housing by low- and moderate-income households in the same cities. Despite the gravity of this issue, empirical analyses of urban land transactions remain rare, especially because such purchases often tend to be piecemeal and obscure, involving a multitude of smaller land deals and a variety of actors. This paper examines corporate purchases of urban land in Gurgaon, a city adjacent to New Delhi that has embraced neoliberal economic policies. By creating a land database for the upcoming sectors in the city, the study makes sharply visible: (1) the radical changes in property ownership patterns from agricultural land to luxury gated communities, (2) the growing corporate investments, extreme concentration of land ownership and deeply unequal distribution of urban land and (3) the use of various illicit practices by market-leading companies in land banking.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A sustainable livelihoods approach to measuring mobilization of resources through social networks among vulnerable populations: A case study of Delhi farmers

  Social Sciences & Humanities Open · 2023 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Business

  Social networks can provide access to tangible and intangible resources, particularly important among vulnerable groups who often establish relationships to meet daily needs and sustain livelihoods. However, it is not just the number of resources available through social networks, but rather the quality and stability—and ability to access them when needed. There is growing consensus that social networks provide access to resources, but the focus on measuring structural attributes of networks does not explain how resources are mobilized. The objective of this research was to develop and test a method for measuring mobilization of resources through social networks. Using a sustainable livelihoods approach, we describe an inductive-deductive, mixed-methods approach to measuring mobilization of resources through social networks, tested through a case study of marginalized farmers in Delhi, India (n = 121 households). Findings are summarized as eight social network typologies. This research proposes a novel method for measuring mobilization of resources and fills a gap in conceptualizing and measuring how social ties enable and impede use of resources embedded in social networks among vulnerable populations. We conclude by discussing implications for interpretation, intervention and strengthening of social networks.

  PublisherDOI

• Regional-scale cultural conservation planning and policy in the United States: an appeal for improvement

  Landscape Research · 2023-11-20

  articleSenior author

  Pennsylvania’s (PA) processes and policies for landscape-scale cultural and visual resource conservation are lacking. In PA, like much of the United States (US), landscape change policies are prescriptive and concerned mainly with ecology, health, safety, and welfare issues. These factors combined relegate cultural and scenic aspects to ancillary matters, often leading to their degradation. Culturally focused fields, such as landscape architecture, archaeology, and planning call for rescaling cultural conservation planning to regional scale. Rescaling would treat cultural resources like other environmental and ecological resources, giving cultural resources equal weight in conservation evaluations. The United Kingdom (UK) has policies specifically for visual impact assessment required for development projects. This paper discusses scale issues and political processes within regional visual and cultural resource conservation in PA, US, compares nascent regional-scale planning efforts in PA and the UK, and proposes improvements to PA and, by extension, US cultural landscape conservation policy implementation.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paula Horrigan

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Liza S. Rovniak

  Pennsylvania State University

  3 shared

• A. Matthiessen

  University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein

  3 shared

• Jessica Ann Diehl

  National University of Singapore

  3 shared

• Deborah S. Main

  3 shared

• Lucas D. Elliott

  Pennsylvania State University

  3 shared

• Melissa Bopp

  3 shared

• Freedman

  Wyoming Department of Education

  2 shared

Education

• B.A., Architecture

  Jadavpur University

• M.A., Urban Planning

  School of Planning and Architecture