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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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Changing publics and the making / emergence of new cultural spaces

Publics and Spaces
Neel Shah, 2022


 How does a public shape and reshape new cultural spaces?

How has the idea of the public changed over the years?

Mumbai has been a major cultural hub for a long time. Since the 1800s it is known for hosting spaces for traders and merchants and later for the British to set up their colonies, institutions and infrastructures.

The idea of public and culture has been constantly evolving leading to the production and dissolution of many cultural spaces. The earlier idea of the public was often related to the ‘subject’ consisting of pre-democratic structures which focused on building iconic monuments and constructing the identity of a society. Later on, the idea of public shifted to that of a ‘mass’ where the public demanded a space for gathering (mass) or a space that was ‘free to access’ and ‘state-sponsored’. It relates to spaces whose function is to host large gatherings, a sense of togetherness, and a space to revolt and celebrate, often related to political affairs.

After the introduction of media, we notice that the idea of the public starts to break down into smaller ‘fragments’. These cultural spaces are no longer ‘state-sponsored’ nor are they ‘free to access’; private  organisations have taken up these spaces. Newer functions of these cultural spaces include clubs, rental turfs, and gyms.

This thesis focuses on the idea of the public as fragments and identifies a few sites in the western suburbs of Mumbai. Drawing a matrix helps to locate the shifts happening in the idea of public and cultural spaces in the last decade and to look closely at the factors affecting/ forcing these shifts. The thesis finds that there are certain patterns emerging while looking at these shifts such as privatisation, new solidarities, cellularization, temporal phenomenologies, internet and social-media based communities, hardening of the edges, and legitimization and sanitization as new urban conditions coming up in the city. The thesis helps in establishing this idea of the public for its impact on the design of cultural spaces and vice-versa. This further leads to the question: What will happen to the idea of a public with the increase in fragmentation of cultural spaces? How can one resuture this idea of fragmentation towards a more egalitarian public? What should be the form and nature of these new spaces?




Read also under ‘Publics and Spaces’:

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Enclosed opens


Publics and Spaces
Akshada Dhamapurkar, 2021
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Urban grounds


Publics and Spaces
Alisha Jain, 2021
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Food institutions: spatial and social networks

Publics and Spaces
Chetasvi Patel, 2024
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Crowds and publics


Publics and Spaces
Gunjan Shah, 2022
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Spaces of dissent/protest



Publics and Spaces
Maryam Sheikh, 2021
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Narratives of public line in Asar Mahal: histories, events and everyday

Publics and Spaces
Nisha Shinde, 2024
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The architecture of public spaces



Publics and Spaces
Ritu Naik, 2021
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Architecture of repose: characteristics and perceptions of open spaces

Publics and Spaces
Rushabh Dedhia, 2019
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Aesthetics of erasure



Publics and Spaces
Sakshi Sawant, 2022
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"open" to "public" spaces in Amravati


Publics and Spaces
Sapna Chopda, 2024
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Interpretative capacities of builtform


Publics and Spaces
Shachi Shah, 2019
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Public as assemblage in Sharjah

Publics and Spaces
Tanushree Bhagwat, 2024
To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
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