This specialized three-day workshop is intended for professionals, practitioners, and researchers working in the broad domains of urban policy, governance and sustainable urban design and development. It intends to provide participants with intensive learning sessions on foundational perspectives, analytical competencies, and technical skills to better address current and future challenges of urban governance and sustainability in the Indian context. 

The accelerated rate of urbanization in developing countries such as India is a fact. India’s urban population is the second largest in the world, and by 2035 nearly two fifths of the Indian population is projected to live in urban areas. Yet what is unclear is how we manage the dual concerns of realizing aspirations of an urban population (for better opportunities of employment, income, and education), and mitigating challenges of urban social life.  The latter includes the presence of socio-economic inequalities, lack of adequate urban infrastructure services, environmental challenges of pollution, waste, and apathy towards practices of violence and exclusion in cities. To add to this, some cities in developing countries such as India are also poised to be most affected by the consequences of long-term climate change. 

As a starting step to imagine sustainable urban futures, what is required is building conceptual and practical capacities to assess unique aspects and patterns of urbanization and urban social life in the Indian context. This includes building analytical capacities of assessing how different developmental contexts affect spatial and social aspects of urban life, understanding practical concerns of governance and regulatory structures in shaping local urban development, and the ability to provide equitable solutions to environmental challenges in urban areas. 

Acknowledging the constant crisis that transforming urban India deals with and the existing shortcomings in collective capacities to comprehend, design and implement contextualized interventions for Urban India, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru is offering a professional development course to address these issues and gaps. 

The course offers a unique combination of perspectives on the nature and dimensions of ​‘urban’ in India as well as offers sessions on relevant technical skills that will enable participants to operationalize their learnings to map, measure the urban and implement suitable sustainable interventions.  The course will be delivered through a series of perspective building lectures, multi-disciplinary case studies, and technical skill development. 

The upcoming workshop will specifically focus on two themes of ‑Urban Drinking Water Provisioning and Waste Management Systems.