The Doctoral Programme at the proposed IIHS IOE will be a five-year, interdisciplinary, full-time programme of study towards a PhD in Urban Studies and Practice. This immediately sets it apart from programmes in single disciplines, such as Economics, or even more composite degrees, such as a PhD in City and Regional Planning, as is given in the American system. The proposed IIHS IOE’s Doctoral Programme will insist on the urban as an interdisciplinary site of knowledge generation and structure doctoral education on thematics rather than disciplines. It is further defined by a set of key distinguishing features, making it a new and innovative offering:
- Rootedness in Indian realities, and further, in global epistemologies in the urban Global South;
- An interdisciplinary pedagogy that responds to the complex inter-sectoral nature of cities and urbanisation;
- Explicit links to actual on-ground experiences of urban management to inform academic learning and training. Thus, academic learning has a direct two-way bridge with issues of immediate and practical importance, thereby reinforcing an insistence on bridging theory and practice;
- A commitment to research on, from and within practice, as well as the production of new theory;
- Engagement with a whole range of settlements—from metropolitan areas to the rapidly urbanising frontier of small town and large village conglomerations; and
- A rooted but globally attuned sensibility that will leverage the best of IIHS as well as the proposed IIHS IOE’s extensive international networks and partners to build a world-class teaching and research programme.