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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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The politics of commons

Mobility and Publics
Ashi Chordia, 2020


I enjoy a sense of freedom in open shared places, beyond the confines of the house. These places are resources, shared by a collective, and inhabited through the practices of the everyday. It is the blurry ownerships that produces the experience of openness.

The term “commons'' refers to open resources that are shared among the public. Cultural theorists such as Elinor Ostrom speak of the idea of the commons as a resource, challenging views like those of Hardin’s that through the articulation of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ speaks of the impossibility of sharing resources. However these articulations are in the context of rural contexts. Very few theorists speak of the idea of urban commons and even when they do so, speak through simplistic relationships. My experience of commons on the other hand reveals them as deeply contested spaces. Therefore the question that emerges is: “How do the commons lend themselves  to be appropriated by individuals who come together to practice their everyday?”

This thesis argues that communities are produced by the associations that are constructed through the practice of using and maintaining commons. The articulation of communities constructs the ‘other’ and therefore produces a politics within the communities itself to contest its inhabitation. It is not through resolutions but through this politics that the experience of commons (i.e. space) is produced. A close scrutiny uncovers the nuances of the politics of commons by analysing five different streets of Malad, Mumbai. The spatiality of these streets is realised through the stories of these shared spaces over the last three decades. These stories bring out negotiations between individuals from different backgrounds and collective communities, which came together to live with each other.

Hence, this study builds towards an approach of decreasing restrictions in the outdoor areas by producing imaginations of spaces which affords negotiations, spaces which allow many more multiciplities to happen, finding ways to soften the existing power structures and hierarchies that they set up in accessing the commons, in favour of a more egalitarian space.


Read also under ‘Mobility and Publics’:


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The spatiality of urban mobilities


Mobility and Publics
Abhinav Pahade, 2020

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Highway urbanization: architecture of flux, uncertainty and anticipation

Mobility and Publics
Ankita Teli, 2020

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Street affordance: a case in Amravati

Mobility and Publics
Arnav Mundhada, 2022

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Upgrading roads: transforming edge affordances

Mobility and Publics
Bharvi Shetye, 2022

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City undone: fragmenting the narrative

Mobility and Publics
Maitreyee Rele, 2020

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Highway urbanization in Chiplun


Mobility and Publics
Ninad Thatte, 2022

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Suburban streets: claims and affordances

Mobility and Publics
Riddhi Shah, 2022

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(Inter-)active spaces


Mobility and Publics
Saloni Vora, 2020

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From the streets: behaviour and experience

Mobility and Publics
Samruddhi Pawar, 2022

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Street as a carnival


Mobility and Publics
Simran Panchal, 2020

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