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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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Affordances of screens between and desire in suburban streets

Screens and Projections
Anshuli Kadam, 2020


How does difference interplay with the affordances of builtform adjoining streets to shape experiences of fear / surveillance and pleasure / escape? My observations of women who experienced fear or discomfort in my suburban neighbourhood from different forms of street gaze shaped this question. At stake in it lies the challenge to open up the associational relationship between public space and social difference - class, age and gender.

Given the COVID-19 quarantine, I engaged with the neighborhood that I live in - Siddharth Nagar, Goregaon (West) - in suburban Mumbai asking little questions vis-a-vis streets: What is the character of the urban form? What is the character of urban society, their routines (movement, pauses, escapes) and their experiences (opinions)? I mapped the urban form while conducting sporadic neighbourhood walks and mobilized my friendship networks to access people of different class, gender and age groups in the neighborhood during and after the pandemic lockdown. I conducted forty eight telephone and online interviews of individuals aged between 12 to 80 who included teenagers (12-15, 16-19 years), young adults (20-25 years), married (25-35) and middle aged adults (35-59 years) and senior citizens with equal numbers across class and gender categories. My study makes the following findings.

Urban Form: In addition to playgrounds and parks, public space along street edges in suburban neighbourhoods. Along with building skins, parked vehicles, compound and parapet walls, pavements, benches and other street furnitures around which activities play out temporally act as screens to give form to public space.

Character of Urban Society: The neighbourhood’s urban society comprises low and middle income households. The former own or rent a one room kitchen or one Bedroom-Hall-Kitchen (BHK) apartment and can afford a bike or a car. The latter own one or more apartments bigger than one BHK (or rent such a house) and can afford more than one car or a bike. These groups can also be distinguished from their spending patterns: for the former, visits to parlours, dining and shopping are once in two-three months; for the latter, they are once a month. Both genders perceive the neighbourhood playground as public space. In addition, women also perceive neighbours’ houses while men perceive paan stalls (tapri), road junctions (nakas), shaded street edges, less illuminated streets as public spaces.

Routines of Urban Society: The routines of movement, pause and escape overlap but also differ across different class, gender and age groups. Middle and low income groups both choose main roads as movement routes for work, groceries and leisure. The latter also use internal roads for leisure. Pauses for both groups include playgrounds, parks and neighbors’ houses. However, the former associates pause with gymnasiums and clubs while the latter associates the same with the pan stalls (tapris) and road junctions (nakas). Escapes for both groups include shaded or less illuminated streets. 

Men and women choose main roads as routes for both work, groceries and leisure. In addition, women also prefer to use internal lanes. The former associate pausing with tapirs, nakas and places with less pedestrians. The latter associate pausing with neighbours’ houses and shops. The former choose escapes outside their neighbourhood while the latter escape from streets with less pedestrian movement and street illumination.

Teenagers, young and married adults choose main roads as movement routes for school, college, work, groceries and leisure. Middle aged individuals choose both main roads and internal lanes while senior citizens choose internal lanes for all movements. Teenagers pause at eateries, compound edges, and for play in parks and playgrounds and escape from shaded and less illuminated streets. Young and married adults associate pausing with playground and park edges, and escape to places away from their neighborhood. Middle aged people associate with walking around parks, pausing by houses, tapris and nakas. Senior citizens associate pausing with parks and neighbors’ houses. Both these groups escape from streets with less pedestrians and  illumination.

Experiences of Urban Society: The experiences of fear / surveillance and pleasure / escape of the builtform adjoining streets are relational to social difference (intersections of class, gender and age) and are mediated by the affordances (screens) of builtform. For instance, one middle income, middle aged woman expressed her opinion of fear as “City Center (shopping center) kade kalokh aslyamule mi nahi yet ratri tithun” and the pleasure of sociability as “Prabodhan (playground) madhe chalayla bara vatta, maitrinnina bhetayla milta” whereas the same was expressed by a low income, middle aged woman as “Sirf andhera hota islia dar hota hai warna logo se kya darna” and the pleasure of sociability as “Prabodhan (playground) me chalne aur naye logo ko dekhne milta hai”.In another instance, one middle income, middle aged man expressed his opinion of fear as “Ratricha rasta neet disat nahi mhanun jaat nahi gallitun (internal street)” and the pleasure of sociability as “Joggers park madhe loka decent vatat, chalayla bara vatta” whereas the same was expressed by a low income, middle aged man as “Hum to yahi naake pe hote hai ya Prabodhan (playground)  jaate hai chalne, joggers park me highfy log lagte he”.

Drawing on these findings, I therefore argue that social difference mediates the associational relationship of individuals to public space along street edges in Mumbai’s suburban housing neighbourhoods. This relationality diverges from architectural propositions of universal ideas of public space, or its memories in the form of paths, nodes, edges and landmarks, or even propositions to make porous builtform edges for safety - all of which are based in a singular idea of public and community. Community is formed by intersections of social difference, and therefore, the architectural imagination of public space along street edges in neighbourhoods needs to respond to it.


Read also under ‘Screens and Projections’:


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Cinema space

Screens and Projections
Arkdev Bhattacharyya, 2020

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The dream house, desires | aspirations | experiences | visions

Screens and Projections
Sneha Pawar, 2020

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