The URA introduced the website as part of the Spring 2025 Faculty Colloquium at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) on February 28th 2025.

The talk was led by Seher Naveed and Veera Rustomji,  titled Introduction to the Urban Repository Archive: Student Perspectives on Karachi. The Faculty Colloquium at IVS is a forum through which the university’s faculty is able to present their research and projects each semester to peers and students. It is a discussion based model to help channels of feedback and community amongst university faculty with different backgrounds and interests. Each semester, the Faculty Colloquium meets up to three times.

During the talk, the URA team explained why the URA exists in the Fine Art Department and how studies on urban research is connected to the field of studio/fine arts. The archiving techniques which the URA used were shared, training workshops which the URA participated in were also brought forward in the presentation to show the step-by-step build up of the website. The URA team then delved into ‘Urban Crafts’ and ‘Projects’ section, to show faculty curriculum in the department which encourages site specific research for fine art students as well as the relationship between faculty’s own practices and their students’ learning curves. The presentation ended with questions by faculty-audience members on why the URA focuses on the Karachi narrative and how we selected students’ works. This allowed the URA team to explain how the website is important as a digital space to continuously archive and document an ever changing city through the lens of young artists as they notice things about the city which are unusual and can be captured through art.