2020_Dimple Mistry — SEA Archives

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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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Urban farming

Frontiers
Dimple Mistry, 2020

What is the spatiality when pastoral activities take place in intensely urban areas? This question is framed in the backdrop of unsustainable farming practices whose expanding ecological footprints in mechanised modes of production have created a false sense of food security, on the one hand, and the potential and limitations of growing food in intensely urban areas, on the other hand.

In this dissertation, I examined four spatialities in suburban Mumbai where pastoral activities take place: railway edges, nurseries, apartments and site and services schemes. These are dense urban environments where pastoral activities have been conducted either for a long time or have emerged anew. I asked five questions of each spatiality in the process of conducting my fieldwork: What is their physical character and spatiality? What is the size of the plot where the pastoral activity is conducted? What is the pastoral activity conducted? Who is conducting the pastoral activity? Who is receiving the pastoral product? In order to address these questions, I documented the above spatialities in the form of sketches and photographs, and conducted interviews with people who are engaged in the business of these pastoral activities.

My study has led to the following findings. The settings where all the pastoral activities are conducted present dense, varied urban typologies such as open spaces between city infrastructures and low rise apartments that have been designated for the expansion of infrastructure, open spaces and backyard gardens of incremental housing schemes, and the terraces of low rise and mid rise apartments. The plot sizes on which the pastoral activities are conducted are typically of two scales: first, between 1000-3000 sq. m. in cases of open spaces, and second, between 20-50 sq. m. in cases of backyards and terraces. In cases of large plots, micro-enterprises are involved in the process of production and sale of pastoral produce to local markets whereas, in the case of small plots, households engage in pastoral production for self consumption, or for their kin and friends. The produce for households are various kinds of vegetables (tomatoes, brinjal, bhindi, dudhi,methi, palak, lal math, vaal, papdi, dodka, mirchi, cauliflower), flowers (hibiscus, brahma kamal, roses, aloe vera, chandni, sadabahar, shevanti), fruits (chikoo, papaya, grapes, mango ,banana) and herbs (lemon, kothimbir, ginger, kadipatta, tulsi, pudina). The micro-enterprises produce greens and leafy vegetables such as bhindi, lal math, palak and methi. I, therefore, argue that along with older activities of pastoral produce, new small-scale open spaces are being used for similar activities in intensely urban areas. These activities are geared towards small scale production and may not address the self-sufficiency of food production in the city. Nevertheless there is a potential to address the making of urban form that affords for pastoral produce in intensely urban areas that architects could consider in the making of new builtform or retrofitting old builtform.

In-distinct boundaries: a compilation of urban relationships with water edges

Frontiers
Ruchi Dixit, 2020

An urban frontier: coexistence of contradictions

Frontiers
Sai Kelkar, 2020

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