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About Us

DACU (Digital Archive for Collaborative Urbanism) is an open-access digital archive dedicated to documenting the changing relationships between people, place, and the built environment. Developed as part of the DAAD-funded project Urban Transformations: Learning from South Asia and Germany, DACU brings together research, creative practice, and community knowledge to explore how cities evolve through everyday life, memory, heritage, migration, and environmental change. The archive serves as a shared platform for preserving and connecting diverse forms of urban documentation—including photographs, videos, architectural drawings, interviews, sound recordings, maps, reports, and research publications. By organizing these materials through a structured metadata system, DACU [...]

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KNOWING AND LIVING (IN) THE CITY – DIFFERENTLY!

The DAAD-funded Partnership ‘Urban Transformation and Placemaking: Learning from cities in South Asia and Germany’ organized an international workshop in Heidelberg between the 2nd and the 8th of July 2023. Over 20 students from participating schools shared a week of field visits, joint fieldwork and discussions with professors, experts and stakeholders of knowledge and experience … KNOWING AND LIVING (IN) THE CITY – DIFFERENTLY!

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NOSTALGIA VS NEED IN RE/SHAPING THE CITY

From November 23rd to 27th, 2023, a South-South Excursion took place in Kathmandu as part of the DAAD-funded Partnership ‘Urban Transformation and Placemaking: Learning from cities in South Asia and Germany.’ This collaboration brought together four students from SPA Delhi and five students from KU Art + Design, accompanied by faculty members, artists, architects, and … NOSTALGIA VS NEED IN RE/SHAPING THE CITY

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“UN/BELONGING TO AND IN THE CITY”

The focus for joint fieldwork and teaching was on the way communities can claim, retain and make places of belonging in a rapidly changing city. In most traditional settlement fabrics, the ‘street’ has remained the social space of community life for centuries, where the private worlds of families gave way to the public sphere of the … “UN/BELONGING TO AND IN THE CITY”

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