Tracing the Urban Everyday, taught in the winter of 2021-22, was based on an intense examination of urban transformation and everyday life in South Asia. This comes from the understanding that everyday lifeworlds, practices and experiences are central for an understanding about what makes up the city, a neighbourhood, and the ways in which people inhabit urban realms. We approached urban transformation from a very particular interdisciplinary and research-based position – from urban design, art and curation as well as anthropology.

The focus of the class was Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, one of the fastest growing metropolitan sprawls in the world. At the heart of the class lied an excursion to Kathmandu in February 2022, for which selected cases and sites were studied with students and faculty from urban design in Delhi and art and design in Kathmandu. The class and excursion were part of an international teaching initiative with Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture and Kathmandu Universities department of art and design, entitled "Urban transformation and placemaking: Fostering Learning from South Asia and Ger­many." It is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in their program "Subject-Related Partnerships with Institutions of Higher Education in Developing Countries.

The class paid particular attention to crises such as cultural heritage and post-disaster urban regeneration and activism (mainly in reference to the 2015 earthquakes), community and neighbourhood, urban responses to Pandemics and
an international art festival taking place during that time (Kathmandu Triennale).

For individual sessions, we had invited guest speakers from the region: Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hitman Gurung, artists and curators and members of the artist collective ArTree Nepal, and Padma Sundar Maharjan, heritage architect from Kathmandu.