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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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City undone: fragmenting the narrative

Mobility and Publics
Maitreyee Rele, 2020


If I were to ask you what are the last five things you noticed in the city, what would your answer be? What is the image of the city that forms in your head?  This thesis is an exploration of how cities are registered.

Cities are drawn, planned and understood through master plans and as a group of homogeneous clusters of spaces. They are given one single narrative, but often that is not how people experience and remember the space. In this dissertation, I study the different relationships that people have with the city and how these relations change the way they register the city. Through previous studies of people like Kevin Lynch, Aldo Rossi, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf and Michel De Certeau I understand that spaces are a product of their physicality, their psycho-spatial aspects and how they are practiced. This makes them heterogeneous bulbous masses filled with textures, images, experience, stories and associations.

In order to understand if there are any patterns in these psycho spatial experiences of cities, I studied 10 sets of people from diverse classes, genders and age groups. I recorded their descriptions of their walks and what they registered of the city in the process. I found that there are four distinct ways in which people tend to register spaces in a city, these are – through lists, as sensoriums, as a series of events and as stories, real and imaginary.  I realised that these multiple readings of a city open up multiple imaginations of the ways in which cities are inhabited by a host of people. These textures are often missed in simplistic cartographic readings of cities. The potential that this research offers is a way to build and intervene thoughtfully in a city that will take into account micro narratives, unique histories and specificities.


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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The politics of commons


Mobility and Publics
Ashi Chordia, 2020

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Upgrading roads: transforming edge affordances

Mobility and Publics
Bharvi Shetye, 2022

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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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