Academic Understanding and Value Addition to Young Professionals
January 08, 2021
- By Simran Pal Kaur,
Research Associate, IHF
Introduction
Young professionals engaging in the housing sector are looking for opportunities that expand their horizons and provide them with necessary skills to make an impact. They are aiming to enhance their ability to respond to the knowledge-related needs of the sector. Indian Housing Federation (IHF) envisions to nurture competent young professionals in the sector through the Universal Access to Housing in India (UnATHI) Fellowship. It is a multi-state programme that aims to build system and human capacities for the low-income housing sector in India.
For the UnATHI Fellowship, IHF will contribute its expertise from ground engagements and leverage its partnerships with the state governments. Anant National University (AnantU) plays the role of the anchor institution partner for the fellowship and offers relevant courses from their Anant Fellowship curriculum to the UnATHI Fellows. In the process of building and co-creating the UnATHI Fellowship, the opportunity of attending select courses offered by AnantU was advanced to two members of the IHF team. Hirokjyoti R Kaushik (Programme Associate - Assam) and Simran Pal Kaur (Research Associate), along with the current cohort of Anant Fellows, attended the course ‘Vulnerability and Built Environment’ instructed by Dr. Renu Desai (Independent Researcher and former Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Equity, CEPT University).
This partnership between AnantU and the UnATHI Fellowship would provide young professionals a platform to comprehend the nuanced complexities of the housing sector, learn different facets of the urban built environment, participate in creative thinking, novel techniques and promote ideas inspired by diverse experiences.
The course ‘Vulnerability and Built Environment’ makes a substantial contribution in understanding vulnerabilities in context of the built environment of a city by encouraging a critical and interdisciplinary approach. The course holds the rigour of academia and practicability by establishing a forum for multiple well-informed discourses concerning urban development. It aims to build a comprehensive understanding of urban realities, processes and challenges in India and the Global South.
Highlights from the Course
The course adopted a multi-disciplinary lens from the fields of urban planning, governance, sustainability, sociology, architecture, and management. It delves into the role that the design, planning and governance of built environment play in shaping different kinds of vulnerabilities. It further explores how vulnerable groups experience the built environment and formulate spatial practices that help them to cope with or challenge their vulnerability.
The module was spread over ten sessions. The thematic sessions were based on: Urbanisation and informal housing; Informal work; Migration; Human settlements; Disaster risks; Identity - Caste, Religion, Race and Ethnicity; Gender and sexuality; Age; and Disability based Vulnerabilities.
The course introduces multiple academic definitions of vulnerability. It outlines that the concept of vulnerability has evolved and broadened to recognise different characteristics of individuals and communities that are exposed to various kinds of harm, while having limited capacity to anticipate and recover from harm. The likelihood or degree of exposure to risk and difficulty in recovering from disruptions vary for different sections of the society.
Birkmann (2013) illustrates key spheres of the concept of vulnerability. He suggests that vulnerability can be conceptualised as a series of increased degrees of complexity and scale.
Birkmann’s Representation of the Scale and Complexity of Vulnerability Concept
Source: Birkmann, J. (2013), Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards, United Nations University Press
The course also discusses vulnerability in context to the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality theory was developed in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American lawyer, a civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. The concept reflects the complex and cumulative way in which multiple forms of discrimination converge in the experiences of disadvantaged individuals or groups, especially through interacting systems and structures of power.
Among other thematic sessions, the course also highlights vulnerability in context to the lack of access to adequate and secure housing. The vulnerabilities of living in informal housing were intricately linked to the question of tenure. The tenure continuum was referred to as a gradation of security across different tenure categories illustrated below.
Continuum of Urban Tenure Types and Tenure Security Zones
Source: Barry, Michael and Augustinus, Clarissa, 2016, United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), Framework for Evaluating Continuum of Land Rights Scenarios
The course offers a new opportunity of learning and adding value in terms of knowledge, concept clarity, skills and critical thinking. However, beyond the theoretical understanding, the course has also contributed to the overall development of a young professional.
Key Takeaways for Young Professionals
Young professionals will ultimately bear the responsibility of strategising and implementing policies necessary for sustainable development. It is important to incorporate their talents, experience and ideas into existing strategies, as well as improve their potential to become leaders in the near future. The ways in which the course adds value to their learning experience is listed below.
Building a more informed perspective
The course raises consciousness of the dynamics that exist in the environment created by human actions and equips fellows with frameworks and mechanisms to evaluate multiple human vulnerabilities. The course treasures the key feature of interdisciplinarity which is reflected through diversity not only in the cohort but also in the teaching methodology. Interdisciplinarity establishes a shared foundation for a well-rounded awareness. This helps the fellows to explore every problem statement in detail by inquiring into all the layers of the issue. When fellows work in teams towards a solution, they coordinate to leverage everyone’s skills towards a reasonable output. It is ideal to have diverse spaces of discourse because it can help to build one’s own perspective while being cognisant of other lenses.
Learning, Improving and Improvising
The fellows get the opportunity to interact with their instructors and sector professionals in a conducive learning environment and find a focused area of interest in the development sector. The different modes of evaluation carve a space for co-learning, peer-reviewing, reflective learning and network building. The academic know-how sensitises fellows about the academic vocabulary and helps to build writing proficiency. The audio-visual material in the form of documentaries and podcasts convey the right narrative and helps to reflect on the agency and local knowledge of different groups to cope with the realities.
The instructors invest passionately and share detailed and dedicated responses to all evaluations by giving constructive feedback for improvement wherever possible. The course acquaints one with the works of academicians, researchers and practitioners who have made substantial contributions to the sector. It encourages fellows to critically think about the role of different actors (state, private sector, civil society and individual agency) in terms of how they contribute to creating or addressing certain urban outcomes, and what can be improvised to make significant course-corrections.
Finding the Right Direction
The course design prepares one to test and assess the applicability of their knowledge in the space of on-ground practice. This is where the classroom debates extend beyond the four walls and the fellow is prepared to move concepts and methods out of the class for inquiry into different ways of practice. Instead of stating the path to follow, the instructors push fellows to choose their own direction after knowing all the possibilities. It intrinsically focuses on leadership development such that the fellows can connect to the real world problems and take informed decisions and actions to address the current challenges.
---------------------
Young professionals demand opportunities and an education which allows them to build their skills and contribute to their own societies. They seek enhanced capability and skills like problem-solving, critical-thinking, communication, leadership and empathy that can support their ambition of being notable professionals in their respective sectors. The collaborations between sector stakeholders (government, academic institutions, think tanks and independent sector experts) actively contribute to this ambition. As more professionals become a part of this collaborative approach, the sector will keep building on its own strengths.