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


Built form and livelihood: research of the urban fishing village of Mumbai

Hybrids and Cohabitation
Sail Jathar, 2022


Urban villages have been undergoing transformation due to the shift in the economic activities of villages. This shift in their livelihood would bring new configuration or transformation in their ecosystem as well as in the built form of the village. Changing occupations changes the spatial configuration of the houses as well as associated public spaces in the urban village.

The city of Mumbai has a set of people and a community, Koli people have a rich history as they are the aboriginal fishing community of the old city. In the communities, the main occupation is fishing. Mumbai has large and diverse availability of fish along the shore which led the community to indulge in fishing and earn profit or surplus, making it their primary source of income.

Urban villages are the result of rapid urbanization. In the context of the urban fishing villages in Mumbai, these changes in livelihood shape the spatiality of the village at the individual as well as community level. The shift in livelihood and the relationship of a people with a community by disrupting to be a forced change in the relationship between the built form and open space along with a new building configuration typology to emerge from the existing one within this settlement, allowing the built form to take over the available common and in between spaces. The common spaces in the fishing villages not only facilitate their everyday activities for livelihood but also become a space for communal relationships to grow.

Through this thesis, I aim to study the factors and agencies responsible for changing livelihood and how it shapes the spatial configuration? My thesis began with the question How does urbanization shape the communities living in fishing villages? Urbanization refers to the population growth shift from rural to urban areas. How do the communities sustain their changing typologies?

In order to do so, the study incorporates the comparison of the two fishing villages at different stages of transformation. Versova Koliwada, the large transformation in the built form, and Madh Koliwada, a settlement functional as for the older way of communal living. Through the study of the living pattern in both the settlements, it was clear that its transformation in the livelihood disturbed the everyday ecosystem of the community. The aim of the thesis is to argue for a change in the way the transformation occurs and to rethink the typology of the built form to incorporate in different scales in the neighborhood. In a transferring context the next stage was focused on speculating about the shift in build form in both the context of Versova Koliwada in comparison with Madh Koliwada due to the shift in their livelihood.



Read also under ‘Mobility and Publics’:


Image 1



The spatiality of urban mobilities


Mobility and Publics
Abhinav Pahade, 2020

Image 1

Highway urbanization: architecture of flux, uncertainty and anticipation

Mobility and Publics
Ankita Teli, 2020

Image 1

Street affordance: a case in Amravati

Mobility and Publics
Arnav Mundhada, 2022

Image 1

The politics of commons


Mobility and Publics
Ashi Chordia, 2020

Image 1

Upgrading roads: transforming edge affordances

Mobility and Publics
Bharvi Shetye, 2022

Image 1

City undone: fragmenting the narrative

Mobility and Publics
Maitreyee Rele, 2020

Image 1

Highway urbanization in Chiplun


Mobility and Publics
Ninad Thatte, 2022

Image 1

(Inter-)active spaces


Mobility and Publics
Saloni Vora, 2020

Image 1

From the streets: behaviour and experience

Mobility and Publics
Samruddhi Pawar, 2022

Image 1

Street as a carnival


Mobility and Publics
Simran Panchal, 2020

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.