On-Ground Exposure Is Not Extracurricular: A Case for Rethinking How We Prepare Architects and Engineers

We teach students to design cities, but rarely show them how cities actually work.

As an architect, there is a question I find myself returning to often: how different would my practice look today if, during my academic years, I had been shown more of the real world that my work would eventually inhabit, not just in terms of design, but in terms of policy, governance, and the systems that determine what actually gets built?

It is not a question about the quality of education. It is a question about its scope. And I suspect many architects and engineers, a few years into practice, quietly ask themselves the same thing.

The gap is not about technical skills alone. It is about the context in which those skills must ultimately be applied.

The Studio Has Limits

The design studio teaches imagination, spatial reasoning, and iterative thinking, all essential. But it also, by design, strips away the friction of the real world. Regulatory frameworks are absent. Clients are simulated. The social and political complexity of urban development rarely enters the room.

Students develop strong design instincts inside this bubble. What they often lack is context, and when they graduate and encounter it for the first time, the learning curve is steep. Not because they cannot design, but because no one showed them the system their design must move through.

Technology Without Direction

Students today are genuinely curious about new tools, generative AI, BIM, digital twins, parametric simulation. Many explore them independently, building fluency on their own. That curiosity is an asset.

But technology without contextual grounding has limits. When these tools are taught as formal instruments rather than as solutions embedded in real policy and implementation environments, students learn techniques without frameworks. They can produce outputs. Translating those into outcomes is a different skill, one that requires understanding the world the tool is operating in.

Technology taught without policy context is a solution in search of a problem.

The Policy Landscape Students Are Not Seeing

India's urban development environment is one of the most active in the world right now. The Smart Cities Mission has invested over Rs 1.64 lakh crore across 100 cities. AMRUT 2.0, PMAY, and the Viksit Bharat vision are reshaping how Indian cities are planned, funded, and built. These are live, operational frameworks, not ministry documents. Every architect and engineer in urban practice will encounter them.

And yet most students graduate without any structured exposure to them. The National Building Code, Development Control Regulations, ECSBC, green building rating frameworks, these are rarely taught. Students encounter them in practice as a foreign language, learning through trial and error when they should already have a foundation.

On-ground exposure is not extracurricular. It is core to what it means to understand the profession.

A Shared Responsibility

Institutions need to embed policy and regulatory literacy into core curricula, not as electives, but as fundamentals, treated with the same seriousness as structures or environmental design. Live project briefs and partnerships with urban local bodies should be pedagogy, not enrichment.

The profession needs to engage more honestly with schools. Practitioners carry knowledge no textbook contains. Government agencies, Smart City SPVs, planning departments, housing authorities, are working on exactly the projects students need exposure to. Formalised partnerships would serve both sides.

And for students: the policy landscape is publicly available. The habit of reading it, of asking what it means for design, is one of the most durable advantages you can develop early.

The City Is the Other Classroom

India will add approximately 400 million urban residents by 2050. The students in architecture and engineering schools today will design and build that future. They are curious, capable, and motivated. What they need is an education that meets the full complexity of that responsibility, one that treats the real city, with all its policy, governance, and implementation reality, as essential learning ground.

The studio is not enough on its own. The city is the other classroom. It is time to take it seriously.