Kanishka Goonewardena is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he worked in the late 80s as an architect for the Urban Development Authority, after completing his first degree in architecture at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka.

Graduate studies in urban design and planning then took him to the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, before immersing himself for a good part of the 90s in more urban planning, political philosophy and social theory, and German intellectual history as an ultimately successful doctoral candidate at Cornell University, Ithaca.

Since joining the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto in 1999, he has coordinated the urban design specialization of its Program in Planning, while teaching critical theory and Marxism under a variety of course titles such as ‘urban design: history, theory, criticism’, ‘critical geographies’ and ‘globalization and postmodernism’. Kanishka’s writings have appeared in various academic and political publications including Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, New Formations, Radical History Review, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, Planner’s Network, Lines and Canadian Dimension. His current research deals with the intersections of imperialism and urbanism, organized around a book (The Future of Planning at the End of History), an edited volume (Space, Difference and Everyday Life: Henri Lefebvre and Radical Politics), and a SSHRC-funded study of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka provisionally entitled: ‘National Ideology in Sri Lanka: A Question Concerning Technology, Modernity and the West’