2020_Janhavi Shinde — SEA Archives

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

Transforming spatialities of house forms in a temple town

Community and Spatiality
Janhavi Shinde, 2020

What is the spatiality of housing neighbourhoods in a temple town that lends itself to various dimensions of religiosity? This question is situated in the backdrop of widely viewed perceptions of small cities as places of unproductive local economies and inward looking culture, on the one hand, and housing interventions that have resulted into a landscape of efficiently produced, repetitive units for living devoid of cultural specificity, on the other hand.

My research was conducted in Trimbakeshwar, a small temple town of approximately 1.89 sq. kms. and 12,056 population (2011 Census) located on the foothills of Brahmagiri mountain at the origin of the Godavari river. I studied houses in five neighbourhoods structured around caste hierarchies that also defined occupations: Trimbakeshwar Mandir Precinct with Brahmin priests’ houses, Kushavarta Precinct with trader shop-houses, Mahajanwada Precinct who were earlier money lenders now perform pukas and rituals, Dalit Vasti Precinct with helpers / cleaners houses and Kumbharwada Precinct with potters’ houses. I analysed housing spatiality at multiple scales: city, neighbourhood, street and housing unit. At the first two scales, I analysed how occupations based on religiosity and caste shaped housing geography, urban morphology and building typology. At the street scale, I analysed how economic and social transactions are shaped between different caste groups. And finally, I focused on how practices of religiosity and gender found spatial manifestations. Zooming-in helped me make three arguments.

First, houses in each neighbourhood exhibit different typologies. The Brahmin House in Trimbakeshwar Mandir Precinct is of a courtyard type where religious rituals were historically performed in the open space. The Coach House in the Mahajanwada Precinct is a wada type house of a joint family now subdivided into long, linear houses. The Sonar House in Kushavarta Precinct is a linear shop-house type perpendicular to the street. The Dalit House in Dalit Vasti Precinct has one common space for all functions amongst all closely packed houses. The Kumbhar House in Kumbharwada Precinct is a linear house with open spaces used for kilns and pottery making. A very few number of properties in these neighbourhoods are changing hands or amalgamating into larger plots by larger tourism entrepreneur interests or gentry from a higher economic class. In a majority of cases, houses are being retrofitted, extended or redeveloped depending upon the demands placed by the new economic context which also causes a change in household configurations.

Second, the edge modulation of builtform corrodes the caste boundaries of neighbourhoods and performs the role of shaping economic and social transactions. The shop-house modulation along the streets in Trimbakeshwar Precinct in the form of verandahs, plinths and kattas allow economic and social transactions of people from different castes including activities such as trading, sitting, chatting, sleeping, lingering and even begging. In Mahajan Wada Precinct, the parapet, katta and benches allow people to sit, chat, rest and walk around the lake edge while compound walls and open grounds allow people to smoke, lean on the walls and park vehicles. Plinths, kattas, shop displays, vendor carts, dead walls allow for activities like shopping, observing, loading-unloading, talking, parking of vehicles, sitting and begging in Kushavarta Precinct, which has shop-houses and the large open space with street vendors in the main market. Small kattas, shops with stools, houses with plinths, low roofs allow the people from the neighbourhood to sit, chat, wash clothes and utensils, play, park two-wheelers and also defecate near the wall in the peripheral road of Dalit Vasti. Kumbharwad’s inner roads have workspaces outside the house as open spaces, sheds, plinths, compound walls, selling and storage corners, and allow activities like working, buying, selling, sitting, passing-by. A porous public realm in a temple town thus emerges at the precinct edge.

Third, each housing typology also exhibits an intersection of entrepreneurship and sociability that has emerged from the cultural specificity of the temple town. The Brahmin House, Coach House and Sonar House - the houses of the upper castes - exhibit a distinct gendered segregation of spaces where spaces used by women and lower castes who entered the house are separated from the spaces where religious rituals as work is performed by men from the house. The spatiality of the Dalit House and Kumbhar House did not exhibit such spatial segregation, and specifically in the Kumbhar house, both men and women participated together in the workspace of the house. The new economy of religious tourism is creating a context for such spatialities to transform.

These findings compel architects to ask: What is the architecture of housing in a temple town whose spatiality responds to the changing cultural specificities of entrepreneurship and sociability in the new tourism economy?

Read also under ‘Community and Spatiality’:

Architecture in tourism

Community and Spatiality
Aditya Panchal, 2020

People's agencies and the afterlife of violence

Community and Spatiality
Dhruvi Kachalia, 2024

Community and water edge: transformations around lakes

Community and Spatiality
Jinal Trivedi, 2024

Post-industrial neighbourhood: transforming spatiality & community

Community and Spatiality
Riddhi Mahadik, 2020

Ethnic solidarities and the culture of commons

Mobility and Publics
Zahra Bagasrawala, 2024

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.