Kadek Wara Urwasi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research (IFAR), Monash University Indonesia, and an affiliate of the Master of Urban Design program. An urban and political sociologist trained in sociology, urban design, and architecture, she studies how states govern inequality, urban transformation, and sustainability in Southeast Asian cities.

She is particularly interested in how formal institutions interact with political discretion, community power, and ideas of citizenship to produce uneven policy and development outcomes. Her work combines qualitative and comparative-historical methods, including archival research, interviews, field observation, policy analysis, and spatial analysis.

Her current research, Rule by Discretion: Informality, Development, and the Politics of City-Making in Jakarta, 1945–2022, builds on her doctoral work on the governance of informal settlements across post-independence, authoritarian, and democratic periods. It develops the concept of discretionary urbanism to explain how selective enforcement, political incentives, institutional ambiguity, and organised communities produce different outcomes within the same legal and administrative system. Her newer work extends these questions to environmental politics and sustainability governance, particularly the politics of waste, responsibility, and citizenship in urban Indonesia.

Wara completed her PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University in 2024. At Monash University Indonesia, she teaches urban design, governance, and an interdisciplinary undergraduate common-curriculum unit.