SEA  
ARCHIVES  

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.


+ CORE COURSES
+ CULTURE STUDIES

+ CHOICE COURSES
+ SETTLEMENT STUDIES


Government housing quarters: work cadres & ecology of associational spaces

Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Asmita Kubade, 2020


The residential accommodation provided by The Central Government for its employees is known as General Pool Residential Accommodation (GPRA). Within the “general pool” there are around 10,000 central government quarters across Mumbai. For every public service provided by the government (like the Railways, Airports, Police Force etc.), there are government colonies where the housing quarters are allotted to the employees based on their grade pay. These colonies house employees from various organizations and departments working in the public sector.

The paper attempts to understand the ecology of life form that gets shaped in these secularly conceived housing. The colonies are planned as per the work cadres. In the absence of any religious, regional, ethnic or familial basis,  what form of social life is conceived for such residential quarters and how does it unfold as its inhabitants develop their own patterns of living within these government enclaves? What particular relationships get forged with people and environment in such quarters?

Through an intimate mapping of lived patterns within the colony, I attempt to discover the ways in which communities get formed, routines get set, associations are forged and friendships evolve within the people of the government colony. Government servants continue to make their life meaningful through various tropes with full cognizance of the fact that their possession of their tenements shall change with their cadres, and are merely temporal. Such a condition produces a distinct spatiality of the government quarters.  The colony holds a sense of separation from the outside world. Life seems to be paced slowly and there is softness in the soundscape. This thesis looks closely at ways in which the architecture of the government housing quarters, works itself out and in turn, institutionalises life.


Read also under ‘Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape’:


Image 1

The politics of dwelling


Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Ashwin Gupta, 2020

Image 1

Architecture and power: practices of escape


Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Herin Vora, 2020

To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
SEA Archives 2014© by the School of Environment and Architecture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.