Through the agreement, the course Humanitarian Shelter and Settlements will be taught in collaboration with the Red Cross as part of the Master's Degree in International Cooperation in Sustainable Emergency Architecture. As well as benefiting students on the master's degree, the course will also be open to industry professionals, who may take it as an independent course. As a result of the signing of this agreement, the UIC is now an IFRC-associated university.

The course will strengthen the ESARQ School of Architecture's programme on post-disaster and post-conflict situations and offer students an opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge on emergency situations through firsthand accounts from experts in the field. Thus, students will be able to improve their knowledge about the relationships between human settlements, humanitarianism and community development, and learn technical protocols associated with reconstruction and humanitarian situations.

Therefore, through this initiative, the Master's Degree in International Cooperation aims to contribute to the training of academics aware of their role in community activism and support in the field of emergency architecture.

Thanks to this agreement and the mediation of the IFRC, the master's degree now includes knowledge from the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR) on post-conflict situations, which will introduce a holistic approach to the emergency context.

About the Master's Degree in International Cooperation in Sustainable Emergency Architecture

The Master's Degree in International Cooperation in Sustainable Emergency Architecture trains architects to develop and reconstruct communities affected by rapid urbanization, poverty, conflicts and natural disasters. It is the only master's degree with an approach that combines international cooperation, sustainable urban development and emergency architecture. It provides students with the theoretical and methodological foundations they need to develop an interdisciplinary approach to managing cooperation and sustainable development projects at the urban and architectural level.

The master's degree, which is taught in Barcelona, is a second-year option on the Mundus Urbano Master's Degree (Technische Universität Darmstadt), which forms part of the prestigious Erasmus Mundus European Cooperation Programme, a collaboration between the European master's programmes offered by the Technische Universität Darmstadt, the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, the Université Pierre-Mendès-France in Grenoble and the UIC.