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Bridging the gap between academic training in planning and architecture with community needs
As India urbanises rapidly, the cities are becoming important sites for climate actions. Increased frequency of natural hazards like heat waves, cyclones, prolonged rains, etc. are adversely affecting the sustainability of urban development. The marginalised urban settlements, often located in hazardous areas, are disproportionately affected by the natural disasters. The cities need to undertake concerted actions based on new knowledge and evidence in order to be resilient. Such knowledge and evidence need to be co-created with the community. Many local authorities often do not have access to expertise capable of sensibly working with various stakeholders particularly with the marginalised communities. However, Indian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) often are not well equipped to meet these demands, since the curricula in architecture and urban planning predominantly focus on technical and design skills and less on community engagement.
Building Resilient Urban Communities (BREUCOM) project was conceptualised and is now being implemented by six Indian partners and two European partners (please see the list below) to respond to this capacity gaps. The project was supported by the European Union under its Erasmus+ Programme for Capacity Building in Higher Education. The project, started in January 2019 has contributed to developing several case studies and Professional Development Programmes (PDPs) by the academic partners. BREUCOM hence helped bridge this gap between planning and architecture training to working environments to understand and react sensitively to community needs and partnerships.
The BREUCOM partners, approached PRIA International Academy to organise a series of online consultations in partnership with some prominent academic institutions. The purpose of these consultations is to explore how the open source knowledge and pedagogy produced by BREUCOM project can be used by other academic institutions as well as to generate a few recommendations for initiating a broader discussion to upgrade curricula which are responsive to community based resilient planning.
