Kharagpur: The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, is joining hands with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a course to study urbanisation in the current developing world, where the concept is no longer limited to the precincts of what are administratively defined as "cities", its director said here on Sunday. 

The course, set to start from October, would see a collaboration between the IIT's Department of Architecture and Regional Planning and the MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, IIT Kharagpur Director Partha Pratim Chakrabarti told media persons.

"A joint report will be produced by MIT and IIT; final presentation will be made at MIT at a two-day colloquium in April 2017," he said.

The practicum will be organised at Santiniketan, Bolpur, West Bengal.

"Santiniketan represents the epitome of an older, nationalist imagery of cultural pastoralism, a pastoralism that defined the arts as much as it undergirded emphasis on the rural and the agrarian from which a modern economy would emerge," said Chakrabarti.

The course will dwell on how planning can evolve practicable norms, within a given ecological, regulatory, and investment terrain and climate, through which diverse range of economic and social styles of activity, as well as a plurality of ecological, cultural terrains can continue to have a future.

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