Nitin Bathla is an architect, urban practitioner and currently a PhD researcher at ETH Zürich. He holds a MAS Urban Design degree from ETH Zurich and a five year Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Institute of Environmental Design in Vallabh Vidyanagar, India. His interests lie in finding new forms of design practice and intervention that are rooted in social frameworks and complexities; in this regard he has been experimenting with forms of global and local knowledge exchange.

His experience spans across a variety of domains which include advocacy and activism, urban research, urban design, urban and transport planning and architecture design. Prior to joining the Future Cities Laboratory, he was helping develop a programme of support for the Indian government, to make city development more inclusive through enhanced citizen participation, as a part of an initiative by Bloomberg philanthropies. Nitin was the curator for the Urban Age award platform in Delhi in the year 2014, through which he researched on grassroots community based initiatives in Delhi and helped translate this into spatial mapping; the project has since morphed into a global knowledge exchange platform, with teams of urban practitioners and community initiatives from the previous award cities cross-collaborating. He continues to actively collaborate with social initiatives in India to develop and test new tools for social action through design.

Currently he works as a independent researcher on issues related with extended and planetary urbanisation. His latest projects include developing platforms for grassroots and planner interface.