Advisor’s Note M. Arch. UD

VIT’s PVPCOA Pune has always been interested and committed to engage itself with the questions of Pune city and the quality of its built environment. Driven by this commitment our school has actively contributed to the projects related to the quality of built environment of Pune city be it an assessment of impact on the skyline of Pune city due to proposed metro corridor in the city vs benefits of underground metro; or be it coming up with win-win design solution for all the stake-holders in the case of pedestrianization of Lakshmi road proposed by Pune Municipal Corporation. Our school has also engaged itself proactively looking at the questions of peripheries of Pune city consistently and exploring comprehensive design and planning solutions in consultation with the communities there. In this process our students are getting hands on experience of being on the field, understanding pulse of the place, talking to people, government officials and NGOs representatives and understanding their perspectives. In a way for us the city is like a classroom and a laboratory. All the while our engagement with the city and its public domain predominantly was happening at undergraduate level, the impetus driven by our belief in creating socially conscious architects who will shape and serve the society made us realized that the space of undergraduate level like our fourth year studio is falling too short to accommodate our commitment towards our city. This realization eventually pushed us to materialize a dedicated space for these explorations in the form of our post graduate program in Urban Design in year 2017. While we continue with our commitment towards our own city where we have been working so far, now dedicated program in urban design has also enabled us to expand our horizons of engagement and contribution to other cities in the region and in India. (308 words)

Program Coordinator’s Note_PGUD

While being aware of the fact that the discipline of urban design has been born in academics and otherwise also it is important to have a strong theoretical underpinning. This theoretical underpinning enables us to locate ourselves in the context of reality, enables us to understand our relation with it and eventually helps us to define our actions and responses. Acknowledging this, we have been developing this post graduate course in urban design that is rooted in the idea of three axes – the axis of Skills, the axis of Scales and the axis of Theories & Discourses. The axis of Skills deals with the development of skills and capacities of critical thinking, design and performance amongst students and future professionals. Second, the axis of Scales deals with the scales that we work on. We engage ourselves with the local issues as well as the global issues. We engage ourselves at regional scales as well as the national scale. We make sure that even while engaging at the local scale with its local nuances  there is an awareness of the global phenomenons, events, thought processes that gives is a comprehensive understanding of our domain and our actions. And the most important axis is the third one, the axis of Theories & Discourses. This aims at developing a capacity of theorizing a situation and understanding the reason and meaning of our actions. Here we engage with the theories and discourses at three levels – exploring and extending the core classical theories of urban design by critically understanding them rather becoming rhetorical about them, investigating the contemporary discourses to understand their relevance and exploring possibilities of meaningful inquiries with them, and the emerging thought processes by speculating them to test their relevance. Our design studios, exercises and assignments are rooted in these three axis not with a limited objective of producing future urban designers who are equipped with these skills but with a larger goal of co-creating and contributing to the knowledge bank of the discipline of urban design.