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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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Sense landscape of an animal in an intense human habitation

Urban Sensoriums
Devarsh Sheth, 2020


Cities are not only made up of people but also of the urban wildlife and this urban wildlife exists irrespective of our want and need. In every neighbourhood you walk through you find them inhabiting the intense human habitation. The urban form of the city allows for these multiple inhabitations where the neighbourhood acts as a home for these stray animals.

The thesis aims at understanding the idea of spatiality for urban wildlife, specifically dogs in an intense human neighbourhood and their relationships with humans and if this form of conviviality shapes the spatiality of the urban wildlife (dogs). Additionally, it explores the sense landscape of a dog in the streets of the neighbourhood.

Inorder to do this the fieldwork involved careful observations of my neighbourhood, Lallubhai Park, Andheri West, where I tried to understand the human animal behaviour such as animal moments, their places of rest, space to procure food/water and sheltering along with the different types of interactions with humans and other animals. These are mapped through the lens of an animal creating a sense landscape of a dog. The drawing method that I have explored is that of constructing a sensorium through these smells, the overall smell of the neighbourhood, geometry of the smell, flowy nature of smell, identification of pockets of comfort and enjoyment, layer of conviviality  which led to a sensorium landscape of an animal in an intense neighbourhood.

These strange inhabitations allow different kinds of relationships to occur between humans and animals at multiple levels like feeding animals on a daily basis, taking care of the injured ones, just observing them or petting them, running pass through them, getting scared and many other forms of conviviality. By doing this strangers become friends, friends become family, instead of having one agency the stray animals start having multiple agencies that look after them in various ways and the entire neighbourhood starts making spaces for everyone to coexist. Thus the question that my research dwells in is what is the spatiality of this animal and human coexistence in neighbourhoods and what are the forms of conviviality shared beyond compassion, objectification and friendship between them?

The conclusions of the thesis reveals that the current urban form is odourless whereas the spaces of comfort and enjoyment for the dogs is the life of this urban form which activates the sense of smell through which they navigate. Thus, I further ask how would an activation of a sense (smell) affect the spatiality of the urban form of this human neighbourhood?


Read also under ‘Urban Sensoriums’:


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Non-ocular spaces



Urban Sensoriums
Charmi Mehta, 2022

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Senses and spatial practice: drawing from other senses


Urban Sensoriums
Gauri Sonar, 2022

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The architecture of shadows



Urban Sensoriums
Himanshi Rathod, 2021

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Understanding spatiality of dream experiences


Urban Sensoriums
Jatan Gala, 2021

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Pet landscapes: spatial awkwardities in human animal interactions

Urban Sensoriums
Paulomi Joshi, 2020

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(Un)canny city | dérive through Vile Parle


Urban Sensoriums
Pranay Kotadia, 2021

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Mechanics of memory and nine houses through sensorium, atmospheres and type

Urban Sensoriums
Pratik Bharati, 2022

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A stray’s space


Urban Sensoriums
Raunak Rangnekar, 2020

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Sense scape: making sense of human senses in a space

Urban Sensoriums
Vaishnavi Bhartia, 2020

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