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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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Handmade urbanism: the case of Eksar

Housing and Living
Vinisha Kuckian, 2019


India, like many other developing countries has seen massive influx of population into its cities coupled with urban expansion. Urban villages are widespread  in many parts of the city, providing adequate, affordable and accessible housing for migrants. These urban villages are developed by the indigenous village population based on a self-help approach and in an unauthorized style.

Consequently, urban villages are characterized by rapid physical development. While a substantial amount of study of such informal settlements has been undertaken, they remain largely unstudied in terms of urban form and its transitional development. This paper focuses on examining the development patterns and their effects on social life and activities within Eksar village in Mumbai.

In this study, a framework has been set forth which considers the context in which the informality takes place; the urban village itself; the housing contained within; the dwellers of those houses and their life form/pattern and the processes through which the village has been designed and transformed overtime. By linking the development pattern of the city, the physical and socio-economic evolution of urban villages is found to be a result of natural response of the indigenous village population and migrants in facing rapid economic development and social transition.

However, urban villages are neglected by policy makers and face either aggressive demolition to replace them with formal neighbourhoods or massive unauthorized and unmonitored development done by the residents itself. The urban villages contain people belonging from various economic strata’s of the society who also have a certain sense of attachment towards the place, which is why the redevelopment policy doesn’t seem to be fit and fair towards them. Therefore as the demolition-redevelopment approach would prove to be devastating, this study explores various other opportunities such as upgrading and providing guideline’s for policy making associated with urban village development.




Read also under ‘Housing and Living’:

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Housing, efficiency and equity



Housing and Living
Akash Vishwakarma, 2019
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Co-operative redevelopments



Housing and Living
Chinmay Gawade, 2019
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Spaces of interplay: between the planned and the lived in housing environments


Housing and Living
Saniya Ranade, 2019
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