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Designed as a comprehensive resource on spatial thinking, experimental pedagogy, and academic practices, this archive serves as a record for reference and critical analysis. 

More than a traditional institutional repository, it is envisioned as an "Archive of Ideas," structured to mirror the conceptual and intellectual framework of SEA. The platform captures specific engagements, explorations, and pedagogical reorientations, expressing the school's distinct set of practices constituted by its students and teachers. 

The collection encompasses intellectual articulations—from course books and objectives to studio briefs and lectures—alongside a  documentation of student work, field studies, and thesis projects. Through this structure, the archive navigates complex inquiries into typologies, ontologies, and genealogies, while exploring themes of environment, urbanisation, futures, and ethics. It serves as a space for rethinking geographies and histories of type, offering the school's co-learning experiments and its ongoing articulation of space and form.


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Unscripting the home: women making space in the city

Difference and Urban Space
Ankita Dhal, 2019


How do women make home in the city? An increased migration of women has been observed in the recent past within the country, especially to cities. It’s crucial to understand how women make home in the city as gender forces us to look at the home space very differently. It makes us challenge and redefine all assumptions created about building a home through a gender neutral perspective. It has deep implications on our individualities and the way we interact with space. How does the gender role of being a woman and its subsequent social scripting affect the way women go through home-making processes? Through the fieldwork, I mapped various kinds of places and social structures that women face, when they come to the city. The aim is to understand what kind of conditioning and imaginations women have when they venture out through personal and vulnerable conversations. How do they challenge these historicised gender roles and limitations of patriarchy to gain agency and claim space?

The first argument of the thesis is that there is a relationship between gender roles and home-making. This is explained through various comparative analysis of both men and women’s experiences in home-making. For the man, interactions happen outside the confines of the home. For women, the domain of the home is crucial—for privacy, her individual and community life, and even for her entrepreneurial needs. As the everyday life and chores related to the household remain attached to women’s identities, they find ways of navigating the spaces differently.

The second argument is that there is a relationship between women, home-making, and the city. The need for women to build a home in the city stems from the fact that it opens up avenues that were previously inaccessible to them. Historically, women have been restricted to certain zones of access. In towns and provincial cities, the women are not able to freely move out of their homes or within their homes. Hence, home-making particularly in city space or the urban areas provides an opportunity to expand their zone of access, saving themselves from long-term patriarchal limitations and restrictions.

The third argument is that there are additional layers to home-making owing to the gender role of women. These additional hurdles arise only when women try to make home.

The fourth argument is that space-making through home-making for women is a long and tedious process.

The fifth argument is that women making homes are able to create fractures/hideouts in patriarchal spaces.

Finally, home-making in a city becomes a means of liberation for women. All of these are tied through an analysis to understand the ease of home-making for women by comparing various kinds of household structures and homemaking processes. A support infrastructure along with new equitable ways of providing housing for women needs to exist that promotes space acts of claiming, respite, community building, amenities, recreation, transgressions etc., so women don’t have to fracture patriarchal space but instead find hideouts or rescues within the city infrastructure itself.




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Cast(e) in space


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Class and leisure


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Zulm as everyday: spaces of oppression in Srinagar

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Gendered spatiality & the factory


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Spatiality of segregation: planning of upper-class homes


Difference and Urban Space
Nitisha Parakh, 2022
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Class and housing aspiration



Difference and Urban Space
Sagar Gurav, 2019
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Gendering in public spaces: a look into how women perceive, navigate and occupy spaces

Difference and Urban Space
Shivani Dave, 2019
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Contested urbans: between settling & resolution


Difference and Urban Space
Stuti Shah, 2021
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