I attended the 14th International Congress of Asian Planning Schools Association, held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China during 12-14 October 2017. And I take this opportunity to thank RSA for awarding me the Travel Grant to participate in the aforesaid international conference. The conference was extremely well organised by the Asian Planning Schools Association and School of Architecture, Tsinghua University in collaboration with the Urban Planning Society of China and China Association of City Planning. The major theme of the conference was: Reshaping Urban and Rural Development through Planning. There were six sub themes: Governance; Identity Heritage; Solidarity Equity; Sustainable Environment; Smart Intelligence and Planning Education
This conference has provided greater learning experience in the field of urban planning more so in the above sub themes. I presented a joint paper (under the sub-theme 6: Planning Education) entitled Exploring Curriculum for Integration of Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change: The Case of Planning Schools in India co-authored by Dr Ajith Kaliyath and Dr Debjani Ghosh of National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi. This paper was awarded the best paper in the congress. More than 198 papers from across 19 countries were presented in the 6 themes and over all 6 paper got the best paper award. This paper won the 4th best paper award.
Roy, et.al; paper explored the urban planning curriculum of three planning schools of India- School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), New Delhi, Department of City and Regional Planning, IIT, Kharagpur and Faculty of Planning, CEPT University and have analyzed the extent of coverage, deepening of research and professional engagement of these schools with the disaster risk reduction and climate change understanding and application of tools and techniques to equip the urban planning for being resilient and climate proof.
The three days conference was quite engaging and provided a better platform for cross learning into the field of urban and rural planning and also given an opportunity to interact with scholars of other countries of world especially from Asian countries. The conference organizer provided the space to display the scholarly materials of individual members and also the organisation they represent. RSA materials such as leaflets of its publications, RSA announcement and others were displayed at the designated place. There were a few inquiries about the RSA which I provided with my limited knowledge, however, I advised them to visit the RSA web site. Many young scholar and students of School of Architecture, Tsinghua University visit the RSA materials display area and look interested to explore further.
CEPT University announcement: CEPT faculty wins Best paper award at international conference