Much of the world’s new city building and settlement transformation will take place in India, China and parts of Africa in the early 21st century. Most of the institutional experience of enabling this large-scale urban change is concentrated in the Americas, Europe, East Asia and parts of Africa.
An active collaboration between knowledge institutions of the global South and the North is crucial to address this asymmetry between opportunity, grounded knowledge and institutional capacity.
The IIHS is a collaborative platform that seeks to leverage global experience and capacity to address these challenges by bringing together the best practitioners, academics, policy makers and researchers together.
IIHS’ partnership is built around curriculum and case co-creation, joint research, education and consulting, that brings together leading global institutions on a common footing. It draws upon a global network of knowledge and praxis partners: universities, firms, think tank and civil society organisations, to address the critical challenge of creating sustainable human settlements in South Asia. These partners include:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( School of Architecture & Planning )
- University College London ( Development Planning Unit at UCL)
- University of Cape Town (African Center for Cities – ACC)
- Arup
- Ideo
- UFABC
- UKP
and academics and researchers from over two dozen other Universities and institutions in India and abroad.
Curriculum co-creation
Over a two-year period IIHS and its partners have brought over 180 of the world’ leading academics, practitioners, policy makers and civil society leaders to co-create the Masters of Urban Practice (MUP) curriculum.
This was partially supported by a one million dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The outcome is a unique inter-disciplinary curriculum framework, focused on creating a new profession and discipline around the urban practitioner.
