June 2011 Institute

On the first day, the learners would register themselves, be introduced to the faculty and other learners.

This session will be transacted through a series of intertwined narratives of different Indian and global cities delivered through multiple media. These narratives will lead up to the contemporary moment, the global economy of late capitalism and multiple imaginations of the ‘World-Class’ City.

As learners will come from a range of academic and professional backgrounds, the primary aim of this session would be to introduce them to key concepts related to the urban realm, drawing upon the vocabulary of a range of disciplines and practices especially planning, urban design, sociology, governance and urban ecology. It will enable learners to see how different stakeholders, disciplines and practitioners view the city and the conceptual vocabulary and perspectives each uses.

This session will also encourages learners to articulate their visions of the ‘World-Class’ City. Using learner biographies, mapping, role plays and multimedia and building on the experiences and assumptions of the learner, the faculty will facilitate a collective articulation of the characteristics, challenges and opportunities that the ‘World-Class’ City presents.

This session will assess the ‘World-Class’ City from an ecological sustainability perspective through the lenses of urban metabolism, equity and sufficiency. Drawing upon Indian and international examples, it will map resource stocks, flows, distribution and access across four urban systems: food, water, energy and mobility.

Learners will be introduced to the practica site in the context of the city of Bangalore and participate in a ‘guided’ tour of select parts of the city where they will get a chance to examine some of the concepts and urban systems introduced. This will lead to the formation of charette groups.

This joint lecture will introduce learners to the challenges, opportunities and apparent trade-offs between growth, development and sustainability in cities and nation-states, by tracing the political economy of decolonisation and development; and its interaction with imaginations of the ‘World-Class’ City.

This session explores contemporary challenges in urban India in providing meaningful livelihoods and creating inclusive economies in an environment dominated by informality, illegality and exclusion. It will critically examine successful responses to these challenges and deliberate on key principles required to replicate and scale them.

After an introduction to the key conceptual and methodological tools for the practica, learners will travel to multiple sites in the city with their charette groups and following a discussion of challenges and opportunities, start working towards their options to respond to them.

This session will examine key urban institutions and actors – public, private, civil, non-governmental, community-based, social and cultural – that govern, manage and shape Indian cities and explore their dynamics.

This session will examine post-1990s processes of democratic deepening, especially in urban areas in India and other parts of the world as well as state, political parties, private sector, civil society and movement-led contestations and interventions.

This session will provide a space for reflection, discussion and contestation around the experiences and assumptions that learners and instructors started with. It will initiate dialogues on potential avenues for action and intervention within the complex realities of the city.

This session examines some of the critical policy interventions at the national level as well as introspects on various ideas and concepts of governance.

This session will examine the principles underlying path-breaking, contemporary practices and projects carried out in the fields of design, planning and engineering that have set new global benchmarks for urban sustainability.