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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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Friendships, solidarities, and spatialities of urban enterprise

Infrastructures
Aakanksha Shah, 2023


The thesis is set in Mangaldas Market, Kalbadevi in the inner city of Bombay. The area has been a market precinct for more than a hundred years now. It was set up during the colonial period with designated markets; eg. Dawa Bazar for medicines, Lohar Chawl for electricals, Abdul Rehman Street for stationery, Mangaldas Market for clothing, Crawford Market for crockery, etc due to proximity to the docks along the eastern edge of the city.

Over the years, the ‘type’ of markets has transformed from bazaars to shopping complexes and malls which emerged with efficiency calculations. Enterprise in the city is often thought of through the narratives of property and proprietary relations which are extremely resource intensive and confined within the extent of a built form. Today, as most transactions have shifted to digital, these shopping infrastructures seem to collapse. Yet the inner city markets continue to operate with the same footfall of people who come to buy things of all kinds. For instance, my mother grew up in Zaveri Bazaar and still prefers to buy fabrics from the same shop in Mangaldas Market, almost as a ritual. Despite the long travel hours, she prefers to go and spend time there once in a while. It led me to think about what allures people to visit these marketplaces. Most probably because they are cultural nodes easily put together with so many different kinds of people and flux of activities. It is an enactment of public space for specific transactions.

The density of people, both buyers and those involved in the routine of the market-shop owners, vendors, people who run food stalls, men who transport goods, etc is held in space through personal negotiations. A plethora of practices hinge on each other through friendships and solidarities which emerge, dissolve, and reorganize in space to absorb the everyday forces. The terms refer to kith and kin relations which move beyond questions of property, recognizing the physical and intangible networks of support. They are less extractive as resources are shared within the urban enterprise.

This hypothesis is embodied in 6 chapters through a spatial inquiry-How do friendships and solidarities shape and are shaped by urban enterprise and its spatialities? It recognizes that these ties are not neutral and aims to establish the relationship between friendships, solidarities, and the qualitative nature of space that can absorb them. It extends to understanding if these solidarities cause exclusions and what are its spatial experiences. Further, can certain configurations help diffuse forms of exclusions?




Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:


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Spatialities of everyday heritage



Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijaykar, 2020

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Remembering ghar: continuities of memory


Memory and Belonging
Anika Pugalia, 2024

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Architecture of a monument: Vasai fort


Memory and Belonging
Chinmay Kadwadkar, 2018

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Architecture and memory: remembering home in involuntary dislocation

Memory and Belonging
Dhruv Chavan, 2018

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On Sindhi refugees: making home in Jalgaon


Memory and Belonging
Khushboo Tejwani, 2024

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Retrofitted domesticities


Memory and Belonging
Nikunj Dedhia, 2020

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Architecture and healing: civil war inversion of public space Borella, Colombo

Memory and Belonging
Rutu Kelekar, 2018

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Spatiality of remembrance: encounters between the native and urban

Memory and Belonging
Tanishqa Rodrigues, 2020

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