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 enables meaningful exploration across cities, localities, projects, and themes, making urban knowledge more accessible to researchers, educators, students, practitioners, and the wider public.
Rooted in a collaborative partnership between Kathmandu University, Heidelberg University, and the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, DACU reflects a multidisciplinary approach that connects architecture, anthropology, urban studies, design, heritage, and the arts. Rather than viewing cities simply as physical environments, DACU understands them as living cultural landscapes shaped by the people who inhabit, remember, transform, and reimagine them.
As the archive continues to grow, it aims to support long-term preservation, interdisciplinary research, and new conversations about urban transformation, placemaking, and the future of cities across South Asia and beyond.