In engineering teaching, continually advancing technologies have impacts on sustainable building practice that make curriculum improvement ever more necessary. On 9 November 2023, in a graduate seminar at the Instituto de Construção Sustentável in the University of Porto’s Faculty of Engineering, the distinguished structural engineer and pedagogue Hanif Kara explored the challenges of “design engineering” under six touchstone topics: Positioning, Process, Beyond Stereotypes; Reshaping Research and Staying Relevant. These topics served as lenses to demonstrate as well as provoke.

Kara used a range of high-profile built projects to illustrate the importance of early engagement on the part of the structural engineer, who always needs to navigate the space of architecture as a condition of his own existence in an era of uncertainties and ambiguity for both disciplines.

On 10 November, at the Architecture Faculty of the Universidade Lusíada, Kara’s topic was “interdisciplinary design”. Speaking this time to an audience of undergraduates in architecture, he unpacked the challenge of integrating knowledge from different disciplines as part of one’s own expertise and practice without encroaching on the other disciplines yet getting the best out of them. Engineers for their part also need to understand that each architect starts from a different starting point to arrive at high-quality outcomes.

Kara used four themes: Deep Skin; The Tower; The Bridge and Mediating Through Technology to review the interdisciplinarity of built projects covering a broad spectrum of type and scale. He also stressed how important it is for architects to reclaim ground and agency so as to avert the negative impacts of the built environment on climate.

A multi-disciplinary, multi-year exploration of the challenges of conserving the built heritage of the historic town of Monforte in Portugal’s Alentejo region was capped in July 2023 with a workshop held onsite. It was conceived by faculty at the Instituto para a Construção Sustentável of the University of Porto, in cooperation with the municipality of Monforte and Lusíada University.

The seminars, drawing from the methodology of the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme, covered:

1. the history of the architectural heritage of Monforte,


2. possible strategies of intervention on the built heritage of the town, and their pros and cons,


3. bioclimatic principles of sustainability applicable to vernacular architecture re-used in a contemporary spirit, and


4. case-studies of architectural heritage management in other historic towns.

The principal message shared by the faculty was that rehabilitation of the built heritage is a multidisciplinary, creative act that must draw directly upon local cultural histories and identities, so that contemporary architectural design is rooted in the holistic knowledge of what has been imagined and built in times past.

Twenty students undertook onsite mapping and diagnosis of heritage buildings and spaces in Monforte. Guided by architects and civil engineers, they developed proposals on conservation and/or adaptive re-use strategies. They publicly presented their strategies, which contained valuable lessons for local decision-makers.

In 2022, 22 Master’s students of architecture at Ibn Khaldun University in Tunis took part in a seminar organised with the support of the AKTC Education Programme. The seminar focused upon the relationships between architecture, urban design and society embodied in four Aga Khan Award for Architecture winning projects located in the Medina of Tunis as well as the colonial era city.

The students explored the itineraries of these projects from their emergence to their completion, while their continuing relevance was assessed through multiple site visits and interviews with local users and inhabitants.

The students benefitted from the long experience of Zoubeïr Mouhli, himself an Award laureate in 2010 and former Director-General of the Association for the Safeguarding of the Medina of Tunis (ASM), which won the Award in 1983, 1989, 1995 and 2010. Five invited speakers from Tunisia, France and Belgium gave lectures that guided the students in their exploration of the social dimensions of the projects, of how urban and architectural quality were reconciled with social concerns, of how spaces, people and societies had interacted over the years, of how particular spaces were repurposed and of how these architectural and urban ensembles were configured. The students consulted AKTC’s webpages and photo collection for their research.

The seminar sharpened the students’ understanding of heritage as a driving force for the attractiveness and social cohesion of cities. The concrete examples they examined introduced the student architects to the concept of living heritage and allowed them to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the awarded projects and their potential for the future.

In 2020, the AKTC Education Programme supported a field trip of ten fourth-year studio students at Notre Dame University’s School of Architecture to Mumbai, India, where they mapped the architectural language and urban layouts of buildings and creations of space in the historic part of the city, notably in the Northern Fort area, Ballard Estate, Bora Bazaar, and Crawford Market.

The students reviewed traditional layouts of housing and referenced these to envision a new township on the eastern waterfront, specifically for the Darukhana community, which is one of five new development sites destined to be part of the Eastern Waterfront Development of Mumbai.

The students also met with local community members and architects to study the city’s traditional urban architecture and worked with the local development team of the Mumbai Port Trust to create design layouts. Their work covered the master planning of the site, plus a variety of configurations for multi-family housing with additional commercial/mixed-use designs. In addition, the students explored executable solutions, working with architects responsible for new designs in the area.

Their report was submitted to the official architects of the project and the Mumbai Port Trust team for future reference as the actual site gets developed.

In collaboration with the AKTC Education Programme, the School of Architecture, Building and Design at Taylor’s University, Selangor, Malaysia offered 13 Masters of Architecture students an elective course entitled “Analysing Architecture” during the autumn semester of 2020.

The course, which analysed projects in Malaysia that have been premiated by the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, was organised in affiliation with DOMA College and DOMA Initiatives Berhad (Architecture Foundation). The course explored how the AKAA projects illustrate the social agency of architecture.

The students focused upon the positive long-term cultural, economic and social impacts of the buildings. They also learned how to utilise the Award’s voluminous archives. They re-visited the buildings themselves, interviewed the architects, and examined how each building has withstood the test of time and has impacted its user community, as well as society as a whole. Finally, in the spring semester of 2021, students continued to study the social impact of AKAA projects in Malaysia, focusing on architectural mappings as well as fieldwork.

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In February 2020, a Winter School entitled “Off-Seams” was organised in Cairo by the Architecture and Urban Design Programme at Nile University, under the aegis of the AKTC Education Programme. The event was also among the outputs of the European Union’s three-year “Integrative Multidisciplinary People-centered Architectural Qualification & Training (IMPAQT)” project.

Twenty-five participants of different levels of expertise and architectural education experience worked over seven days with national and international faculty and an Aga Khan Award for Architecture winner. They engaged in an architectural conversation with two significant Cairo spaces, the Opera and Attaba squares, both located at urban seams that are temporal as well as spatial and have evolved within the urban fabric on multiple scales.

The outputs of the Winter School were twofold. Teams carried out site sketches, mapping of activities and identification of flows. Each delivered a graphic poster that represented the strategy of intervention and its components for validation; each team also developed one aspect of its strategy in concrete detail. An exhibition of this work was presented to the IMPAQT project experts and other academics, followed by a panel discussion on the process that was attended by students and faculty from other Egyptian universities.

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15 young people aged 15-17 from Dubai, Muscat and Riyadh explored the importance of the built environment in relation to the quality of life during a three-day discovery field trip to Oman. The trip was organised in October 2019 in cooperation with the AKTC Education Programme.

The trip was organised by youth facilitators from the United Arab Emirates, who had been trained at the Institute of Ismaili Studies and University College London).The participants gained an understanding of the role of architecture and architectural conservation, as reflected in the efforts of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme.

The case studies they examined included Stone Town in Zanzibar, Darb al Ahmar in Cairo, and Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi. On-site visits included the Muttrah Fish Market – a project shortlisted for the 2019 Aga Khan Award – and the Omani sites of Harat al Bilad, Misfat al Ibriyin and Nizwa Fort. The trip was also facilitated by researchers from the Centre for the Study of Architecture and Cultural Heritage of India, Arabia and the Maghreb (ArCHIAM) at Liverpool University, which is an active contributor to the AKTC Education Programme.

The field trip enabled this highly motivated group to understand first-hand the importance of context-sensitive architecture and heritage conservation, particularly in small traditional settlements.

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In the autumn semester of 2019, in collaboration with the AKTC Education Programme, two courses on integrated urban rehabilitation were offered by the Department of Architectural Engineering & Environmental Design at the Faculty of Engineering & Technology of The Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport (AASTMT), Smart Village Campus, Cairo.

Both courses drew upon the experience and methodology of the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme (AKHCP). The first course, taken by 20 undergraduates, was “Introduction to Urban Design: Impact of Cultural Heritage on Human Well Being,” while the second, entitled “Conservation of Architectural Heritage: Urban Revitalisation & Community Development,” was offered to 18 graduate students.

AASTMT designed the two courses with a view to minimising the gap between academic learning and practice in the field of urban conservation. Both courses allowed students to test academic research findings concretely, on-site. They also learned from the AKHCP’s methodology for community revitalisation in physical, cultural, economic and social terms, as applied in the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar area of historic Cairo.

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The School of Architecture and Planning of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE – known previously as Manipal University) at Udupi in Karnataka, India, organised a multi-disciplinary workshop in 2019 for dissertation-level students that explored anthropological understandings of the built environment.

The workshop was inspired by the need to see architecture beyond the idea of “creation”, to uncover and analyse the close links between humankind and the spaces people inhabit, to understand heritage and its cultural and social meanings beyond purely technical or constructional aspects.

It brought together students and faculty from the Architecture, Fashion Design, Interior/Product Design, Humanities, Liberal Arts & Language Studies and Philosophy departments of MAHE. In the first phase of the workshop, 44 students working on dissertation papers interacted with AKTC consultant Dr AG Krishna Menon as well the well-known senior architect M N Ashish Ganju, together with MAHE faculty to define research topics and methods.

Their reflections were guided by the experience of the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme (AKHCP). In the second phase, students presented dissertation papers in the presence of their faculty and external mentors/reviewers.

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In January 2019 the Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, published a 152-page publication entitled Indore: Dialogues in Existence, based on a workshop for the fourth-year design studio on community architecture sponsored by AKTC Education in late 2018.

The publication was designed, written and produced entirely by the students and faculty involved. Sixty students revisited Balkrishna Doshi’s Aranya Community Housing and Hemanshu Parikh’s Slum Networking of Indore City projects, which received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1995 and 1998 respectively. The students looked at how the visions of the architects have been either sustained or transformed; they also documented lifestyles, conducted in-depth interviews in the two communities, did measured drawings and mapped the open and public spaces as well as the supporting infrastructure.

Their inquiry revealed the shifting yet consistently inadequate governmental stances towards housing for the urban poor: as Indore has grown exponentially, there has been scant concern for meeting their needs. The research also revealed how policies shape cities and people’s lives in hard reality – as against the idealistic visions of the architects. The Slum Networking area was once at the fringes of the city but is now centrally located and has high market value, yet the project itself is largely forgotten and the concerns it addressed largely ignored. Doshi’s Aranya Community Housing still refers to the architect’s original master-plan, but not to the idea of increment that it intended.

The tasks carried out by the students, together with their interactions with urban designers, architects and engineers, generated intense debate on various aspects of urban housing, both formal and informal. Eminent contributors included B V Doshi himself.

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In January 2019, the Institute for Public and Social Policies of the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) organised, with the support of the AKTC Education Programme, a Winter School entitled "The Place of the City".

This training workshop, for27 participants and 33 speakers from Brazil, Italy and Portugal, examined the predicament of the Bairro da Mouraria. This is one of the oldest neighborhoods of Lisbon. It is currently an ethnically plural space (home to a large Muslim immigrant population) but one that is increasingly subjected to the strong threat of gentrification due to pressures from the tourism and real estate industries. A focus of the programme was improving public policy skills that can benefit communities living in such historic centres where urban rehabilitation is being undertaken and the threat of gentrification looms. Using the approach and methodology of the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme, the Winter School brought the insights of architecture and urban conservation to bear on the challenges of planning, executing and evaluating concrete measures to increase the quality of life of the communities concerned. It combined theory and reflection with the analysis of urban development models that foster cultural diversity and social cohesion of residents. The intensive two-week programme consisted of master classes and in situ workshops involving fieldwork and community interactions; it concluded with an exhibition and public presentation. The Santa Maria Parish, where Bairro da Mouraria is located, was a partner as well as the Lisbon City Council, while the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa provided 10 grants for participants.

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This workshop was organised in Mumbai in 2018 for 37 first-year students in the M. Arch in Urban Design and Conservation at the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environment (KRVIA).

The workshop was innovative in its exploration of multimedia as a mode of inquiry and as a story-telling tool that can provoke public dialogue around conservation challenges.

The project emerged from KRVIA’s own reflections on its research and teaching methods, combined with a close reading of the principles and procedures underpinning the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme. The students worked in small groups at three sites located on the urban margins of Mumbai. Their enquiry encompassed local building practices, how stakeholders maintain historic sites, how they recognise heritage and how they frame local history. Basic training in film-making was given to all the participants. Lectures by experienced practitioners, including one by Ratish Nanda, CEO of AKTC India, provided different analytical perspectives on the issues involved.

The workshop yielded nine films of around eight minutes each. The filming process raised questions that go beyond traditional urban conservation practice and required the inputs of diverse stakeholders, while the use of film as a documentation tool enabled a more nuanced narrative of urban spaces to be generated. By interacting directly with residents, the students were able to discern how communities themselves associate with the built form. Film-making allowed them to better articulate questions and describe on-the-ground conditions, bringing film together with drawings, text notes and audio.

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In the autumn of 2018, in the Masters of Architectural Design course at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, 22 students benefited from a seminar course entitled “Contemporary Architecture: Practices and Processes”.

The students worked on the archives of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture as well as those of the magazine Domus India, whose Editor Dr Kaiwan Mehta, a leading architectural scholar and critic, was their instructor. Each student prepared an annotated photo essay for the course. Informed reading of Aga Khan Award Master Jury reports (as well as review essays in Domus) gave the students a studied approach to the projects, The process enabled students to understand by observation how a building/project is approached and studied. The structured nature of the AKAA archives also taught the students what responsible research and analysis of architectural projects actually entails.

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In 2018, 35 students took an elective course organised at the Goa College of Architecture, by the distinguished conservation architect Professor A G K Menon. They explored the archives of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in order to analyse a premiated project related to their own research topics.

Each student was required to go through the relevant project report, to read and digest the Master Jury citation, as well as other materials, and to write a 2000-word paper critically analysing the project. A second outcome was a set of 13 posters, one for each cycle, which was exhibited at the College in September-October and inaugurated by the Vice-Chancellor of Goa University.

The faculty members who had engaged systematically with the AKAA archives in order to prepare the course have underlined the positive impact this exercise has had on student research and writing capacities. It has also taught them to value the significance of working with the local cultural and environmental contexts in the development of their own projects. The College plans to continue giving this course as an integral part of its curriculum.

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The Srishti Institute for Art, Design and Technology conducted the first field workshop in the historic town of Gulbarga, Karnataka, India in 2018. Entitled “Culture of Resilience”, the workshop drew on learnings from the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme.

Twenty-five students from a range of disciplines explored the cultural landscape of Gulbarga as well as its communities of inhabitants and their everyday lives, each developing her or his own project at the site. Gulbarga was the capital of the Bahmani Sultanate of the Deccan in the 14th century. The workshop was integrated with the 16-week undergraduate thesis project studio offered by Srishti in partnership with Team YUVAA (Youth United for Vigilance, Awareness & Action), an NGO in nearby Bidar.

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On the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding with AKTC, the Bengal Institute for Architecture in Dhaka, Bangladesh, organised a one-month course in 2018 for 24 senior undergraduate students and young professionals on the architectural design lessons from Aga Khan Award-winning projects in the region.

Drawing directly on the experience of Award-winning architects and the communities within which the projects were placed, the course covered the topics of community building, public spaces, urban regeneration and landscape design and architectural conservation.

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