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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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Street as a carnival

Mobility and Publics
Simran Panchal, 2020


In a city/locality which is planned and follows a strong grid, there are activities that are not thought of while planning it. Some of these activities are considered as “inappropriate” by society and there are people who are considered as deviant bodies who are not allowed to enter within a space because they do not fall under the normative idea of beauty and other norms that are created by the society. This leads to the question: what is a neutral space which can allow all kinds of bodies to inhabit it?

The thesis aims to understand the spatiality of neutral spaces that can allow everyone in, without creating any differences, where deviant bodies, people who do not fall under the normative categories of beauty in society are allowed without anyone judging them. A space where one can enact their activities and practice and produce their own space. It also aims to understand the affordance of space that allows everyone to enact these activities and practice and produce their own space.

The thesis argues that a carnival is such a space that allows multiple bodies to simultaneously inhabit space. The philosopher Bakhtin speaks of the carnival as a space that breaks the idea of hierarchies and allows everyone to escape from the reality without any/few restrictions. The image of the Carnivalesque talks about the playful spirit of the carnival in which there is no idea of authority. It focuses on laughter, role reversal, dressing up, and a place where multiple conversations take place simultaneously.  Here normative ideas of the dirty and unclean do not exist.

The carnival allows and opens up a new world for a lot of people who cannot enact and be themselves in the real world. Bhaktin also describes carnivals as ‘second life’ for people.

The thesis looks at a stretch of a street in Charkop, Mumbai as its field. Though this is a part of the city that follows a restrictive gridded development, life spills out of the grid-like a carnival. When seen through the metaphor of the carnival as the most neutral space, the street opens up many possibilities for simultaneous practices and productions of space.  It allows people to create conviviality amongst each other and enact their activities and practices while producing their own space. It thus tries to establish a relationship between the carnival-like nature of the street in Charkop which tends to behave like a neutral space in the city.

To conclude the dissertation tries to look at a carnival-like support infrastructure that can blur the boundaries between the planned nature of the city/locality and the activities that take place in it that are not planned for, which ultimately lends itself to becoming a neutral space in the city.



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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City undone: fragmenting the narrative

Mobility and Publics
Maitreyee Rele, 2020

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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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