Higher education, urban resilience and infrastructure

The project focuses on developing a detailed curriculum, responding to the knowledge and skill gaps identified in a previous study funded by an Exploratory Grant (EG) awarded by the British Council in 2021-22. With the EG, we analysed the gaps in current curricula and pedagogical approaches of how urban resilience and disaster resilient infrastructure (DRI) is being taught in HEIs in India. It leveraged the combined experience of DPU and IIHS, assembled a network of institutions committed to redefining DRI in of higher education institutions (HEIs) and developed a baseline curriculum.

The top-up project expands the current network to include a UK-consortium of HEIs, which will work with the Indian consortium to co-create a detailed curriculum. The curriculum will be piloted in 1-2 Indian partner HEIs, which will entail identifying workable strategies to co-teach the developed curriculum as a programmatic intervention. The curriculum will respond to the need for interdisciplinary education to address critical challenges of urban infrastructure resilience. We propose an approach that recognises interdisciplinarity as the organising principle, which will foster substantial critical thinking together with reflexive and transformational pedagogical methods and modes of delivery.

The curriculum will enable creating critical capacities in ensuring agile response to the urban infrastructure resilience challenges, via integration of practice dimensions and thus catering to real world demand. As such, the proposed design of the curriculum resonates well with the emerging context of HE in both India as well as the UK.

Team

PI: Prof Cassidy Johnson (DPU)

Nihal Ranjit (School of Environment and Sustainability, IIHS)

Dr Amir Bashir Bazaz (School of Environment and Sustainability and School of Infrastructure and Systems, IIHS)

Vineetha Nalla (School of Environment and Sustainability, IIHS Gargi Sen (School of Systems and Infrastructure, IIHS)

Felipe Rivera (UCL EPICentre)

Sahin Dede (UCL EPICentre) Mark Ojal (UCL IRDR)

Partners

UCL EPICentre Urban Cluster (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/epicentre)

Indian Institution for Human Settlements (IIHS,https://iihs.co.in/) 

Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI, https://cdri.world/)

Outputs

Higher Education Curriculum on Disaster Resilient Infrastructures (report)

Higher education, urban resilience, and infrastructure: How do we reimagine curriculum content and delivery? (report)

Considering curriculum, content, and delivery for adaptive pathways: higher education and disaster resilient infrastructure in the Indian urban context (paper)

 

Funding: British Council Going Global Partnerships grants (Top-up Grant), phase 2