http://pukar.org.in/
Mission
PUKAR is an independent research collective and an urban knowledge production center that provides a platform for cross disciplinary, multi-sectoral, community based research for issues related to urbanization and globalization.
PUKAR aims to democratize research and broaden access to knowledge among disenfranchised or weakly institutionalized groups and to create a space from which their non traditional and non expert knowledge can contribute to local, national and global debates about their own futures. It promotes research as a right for everyone and uses it as tool for pedagogy, advocacy, intervention and transformation.
Goals
The goal of PUKAR is to create a world-class incubator for knowledge, debate and innovation about cities and globalization. It takes Mumbai as its conceptual base and laboratory for concerns related to global cities and helps create new urban knowledge, through maximum participation of the citizens, thus enhancing circulation of ideas, designs and concepts between the local and the global.
PUKAR aims to democratize research and broaden access to knowledge among disenfranchised or weakly institutionalized groups and to create a space from which their non traditional and non expert knowledge can contribute to local, national and local debates about their own futures. PUKAR is designed to complement, on the social and cultural side, the current growth in technology driven knowledge initiative in India.
PUKAR, an independent urban knowledge production center serves as a convener for debates and conferences, an executor for targeted research work and a disseminator through debate oriented white papers, discourses, and internet based reports, website and e-magazines. It works though the following means to achieve these goals:
Cross Knowledge
PUKAR facilitates corporate leaders, academics, policy makers, activists, cultural and social analysts, researchers and donors to brainstorm outside the constrains of a single institution, constituency or a project to identify new ways to think about urban challenges.
Partnerships
The center draws on partners from the world of urbanism, urban activists and practitioners, academicians and scholars, policy maker from public and private sector, in all its activities- initiation, execution, dissemination and evaluation.
Learning Lab
The center is set so that observers from other institutions and locations, including funders, can observe it’s working to see how they might initiate similar exercise in their own institutions, tailored to their needs.
PUKAR regards knowledge, action and research as interactive and recursive processes. Knowledge involves documentation and intervention. Action, in this perspective, involves exploration and innovation. Research, not simply a prerogative of academic world, is a disciplined means of acquiring new knowledge. PUKAR seeks to reinvent the terms of the relationship between knowledge, action and research.