Engineering Inclusive Cities | July 2020 | Online
The ninth Royal Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering for Development symposium was conducted online, and explored the theme of 'Engineering Inclusive Cities'. The symposium focussed on three sub themes:
- Mobilities
- On grid / off grid energy access
- Design and density
The event was co-chaired by Dr Jaideep Gupte, Global Challenge Leader, Sustainable Infrastructure and Cities and Professor Nausheen Anwar, Director, Karachi Urban Lab. The symposium focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, exploring inclusivity in the infrastructure of cities, in a developing country context. It highlighted that human infrastructure interactions are gendered, unequal, segregated and radicalised. Over time, inequality gets locked into spatial forms and institutional systems in cities. The event co-chairs authored a concept note for the event that explores these ideas in more detail.
The event was held on a bespoke virtual platform that facilitated networking, collaboration and offered an opportunity for delegates to engage with the content and each other in the weeks leading up to the live discussions that took place over the course of two days. Following the symposium, delegates had the opportunity to be awarded up to £20,000 in seed funding for an idea generated from collaborations created during the event.
Event Chairs
Dr Jaideep Gupte, GCRF Challenge leader, Cities and Sustainable Infrastructure
Jaideep acts as a champion for the Built Environment on behalf of UKRI. Jaideep’s research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Department for International Development, and the European Commission, among others.He is the Principal Investigator on the ‘Smart Data for Inclusive Cities’ programme funded by the European Commission; a Co-Investigator of the GCRF ARISE Accountability in Urban Health Research Hub; and the Principle Investigator of the ‘Governing the ungovernable’ programme funded by the Gerda Henkle Stiftung. Jaideep has a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College), an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Sussex, and a BA (Hons) in Economics from Simon Fraser University. Jaideep’s research has received the Global Development Network Medal for Outstanding Research, Category: Rule of Law. He was formerly Prize Fellow of the Urban Design Research Institute, Mumbai. He has conducted primary research in South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Nepal) and sub-Saharan Africa (Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria).
Professor Nausheen Anwar, Director, Karachi Urban Lab
Nausheen is Director, Karachi Urban Lab (KUL) and Professor of City and Regional Planning in the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts (SSLA), Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi. She received her PhD in City and Regional planning from Columbia University, USA.
Nausheen’s work focuses on the politics of urban planning, infrastructure development and climate change. She has authored a book, Infrastructure Redux: Crisis, Progress in Industrial Pakistan & Beyond (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), which explores, through detailed cases of Sialkot and Faisalabad in industrialising Punjab, the double-edged narratives of development that frame infrastructure in post-independence Pakistan. Her ongoing research involves three projects. The first is a GCRF-funded three-year comparative global study of human infrastructure interactions in the off-grid city, using heat as a lens to rethink vulnerability, marginality, risk and power in urban environments. The second is a two-year GCRF-funded knowledge network building project to promote new understanding and learning about the interactions between urban violence and climate change risks in urban areas of the Global South. The third is a two-year International Development Research Centre funded project that examines new-fangled regimes of infrastructure planning and land acquisition/development and attended regional-urban transformations involving forms of displacement, enclosure, protests, and formal/non-formal pathways of redress in urban Pakistan.