Increased frequency of natural hazards and sea level rise are expected impacts of climate change in India. Marginalized urban settlements are often vulnerable to disaster due to their location in hazardous areas and the use of non-durable building materials, already today their inhabitants are therefore strongly affected by climate change. But amidst strives to meet climate targets, the poor’s needs are mostly overlooked.
In this context, there is an urgent need for paradigmatic shift in the education of graduate students in spatial planning and design as well as training of urban professionals from different backgrounds in order to confront upcoming challenges related to climate change impacts on urban informal settlements.
One of the outcomes of the BReUCom project at KRVIA is envisioned as a book titled, “Resilience Paradigms and Southern Urbanism”, which engages with questions of resilience specific to the Global South, in particular, tier-two cities of India.
The Centre of Resilience Learning (CoReL) has been set up with the aim of disseminating knowledge on global resilience practices. The programs offered under CoReL have been derived from the research undertaken as part of the BReUCom project, with collaborations between 4 Indian Institutes of Higher Learning, 2 European Institutes of Higher Learning and 2 Indian NGO partners. Programs under CoReL deal with various aspects of urban resilience, and provide the participants with an in-depth understanding of the various factors that enable resilience in our cities.
BReUCom PDP 5: Heritage Resilience for Future Cities Future cities ranging from Forest cities, net zero cities to smart hi-tech cities all are geared towards sustainability and seek to address the challenges of climate change. What about the historic cities? How does the discourse on resilience relate to the heritage
BReUCom PDP 2: Understanding Informality – Mapping & Strategising Resilience Urban challenges are diverse, and they exist in different forms and with different severity across the world (Schneider 2002). Among other urban challenges, the issue of urban informality and its infrastructure is significant, and has a profound impact on slums
BReUCom PDP 1: Contemporary Perspectives on Resilience The program titled “Contemporary Perspectives on Resilience” aims to expose the participants to various paradigms of Resilience in modernday urban settings. These range from Socio-ecological and Cultural aspects, to contemporary definitions of the issue of Resilience. Registrations close on 18th March 2021 at 13.00
BReUCom PDP 4: ECO-logs 2.0 The Professional Development Program titled ‘ECO-logs 2.0- Digital Interpretations of Ecological Vulnerabilities through Open Source Geo-Spatial Technologies’ is a two day hands-on-workshop series on visualizing, analyzing and interpreting environmental data using the open source Q-GIS Platform. Link to Register: https://forms.gle/VLvuy1ALHFgRD16t6 Registrations close on 18th March 2021 at
BReUCom PDP 3: Eco-logs 1.0 The PDP-III titled ‘ECO-logs 1.0- Exploring Socio-Ecological Resilience in the Global South’ is a two day lecture series with interactive sessions wherein academicians and professionals both from India and Europe discuss the theoretical underpinnings of resilience and examine the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Several courses in the Post-graduate department at KRVIA, have been formulated as an outcome of various Case Studies, undertaken as part of the BReUCom Project.
(co-funded by Erasmus Plus Program of the European Union)
This course attempted to understand urban-scape through the phenomena of culture. The formation of cultural
territories trough historical processes and emergence of new transformation through various means in recent time
of cultural territories often brings conflicting paradigms. The course attempts to understand and locate such cultural
territories through various reading based on sociological and anthropological literature and delineate the cultural
led urban transformational process in contemporary times.
To study and review sociological and cultural heritage perspectives on the meaning of resilience from a
South Asian lens. The questions of cultural practices in-built in the everyday urbanism of Indian cities are
inextricably tied to the questions of resilience. A number of urban studies scholars, sociologists, ecologists, and
anthropologists have stressed the importance of deploying a cultural ecology perspective to better understand
urbanization, urban processes and urbanism in the Indian context (Baviskar et al 2007, Srinivas 2004, D’Souza
and Nagendra 2011). Gidwani and Baviskar (2011) as well as Nagendra and Ostrom (2014), Manjunatha and
Nagendra (2016), and Parthasarathy (2011) have engaged with the idea of urban commons in re-theorizing cities
in India from a socio-ecological perspective.
The elective approaches issues of resilience through the examination of cultural artefacts, especially those emerging from moving image practices.
This course would open the discussion to explore the notion of Resilience in the context of Indian cities. It would validate many of the urban practices that are often unseen, spontaneously grown that are evolved by communities over time; as being resilient. It would try to realize the potential of such practices within the context of ecological, social and economic resilience that we realize is of prime importance to address the issues of climate change and fragmentation in our contemporary cities. It would also explore the possibilities of such practices informing field of design at all scales – the regional, the neighbourhood as well as the building.
The course deals with the holistic understanding of urban landscapes as complex ecological systems which encompass the dynamic relation between resilient ecology and space. The course is designed to provide exposure to the students regarding the latest studies, theory and research outcomes of climate change and socio-ecological resilience for human settlements. The students are encouraged to understand advanced concepts and explore relevant contextual frameworks and approaches for the planning and design of urban landscapes.
Training Urban design and urban conservation professionals in understanding water vulnerabilities and making urban centres water resilient.
Training Urban Design, Planning and Conservation professionals towards building resilience of native historic
cores
Training Urban design and urban conservation professionals in understanding water vulnerabilities and making urban tier II cities water resilient.
USM’s
Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute
for Architecture & Environmental Studies
Vidyanidhi Bhawan II, Vidyanidhi Marg, J.V.P.D. Scheme
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Pin – 400 049
Ph: +91-22 26700918
+91-22 2620 0923
Email: admin@krvia.ac.in
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