The International Institute for Asian Studies has been awarded a grant of € 1.25 million under the Marie Curie Actions ‘International Research Staff Exchange Scheme’ (IRSES). This is part of the European Union’s Research Executive Agency’s Seventh Framework Programme. Entitled ‘Urban Knowledge Network Asia’ (UKNA), the new IIAS-led programme consists of a network of 102 researchers from 13 partner institutes in Europe, China, India and the United States. The project officially started on 1 April 2012 and will run for four years.
The UKNA is the only global urban knowledge network of its kind and one of its key objectives will be the nurturing of contextualised and policy-relevant knowledge on Asian cities. This will be attempted via a series of research staff exchanges and specifically targeted case-study-based research, all of which relates to the network’s three main themes of Housing, Heritage, and the Environment.
IIAS is the coordinating institute, with Paul Rabé acting as overall coordinator. The partner institutes are the Architecture Faculty of the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville in France, and the Development and Planning Unit (DPU) of University College London in the United Kingdom.
The Chinese partner institutes are the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (CAUPD) in Beijing as well as the Beijing University of Technology, Tianjin University, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) and Hong Kong University. India is represented by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) in Bengaluru, Ambedkar University in Delhi, and the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University in Ahmedabad. The University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development (SPPD) in Los Angeles is the UKNA’s United States partner.
Visit here the project’s website.