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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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Urban farming: emerging practices and spatial affordances

Life in Spatial Intersections
Khushi Surana, 2023


What are the emerging practices and spatialities of farming in Mumbai? This question is formed in the backdrop of a rise in diverse urban farming practices in Mumbai. The thesis opens up the challenge to understand the relationship between the practice of urban farming and the spatial affordances of built form to absorb urban farming.

I chose cases based on their scale and diversity in the built form configuration, including terrace gardening, kitchen gardening, vertical farming, etc. The analysis started with observation of each space, followed by in-depth interviews based on categories of analysis, like context/motive, which talks about the year and the reason for practice, form, and spatiality, to understand the area and the configuration of the space and form. There was also an aspect of actors focusing on the user group and the density of people, and lastly, the operations focusing on the process from the input (from the plantation) to the output (using the end product). The cases range from a small bay window to large terrace gardens to renting a small place in a galli. These created a clear understanding of the space and its relationship to the built form.

The backdrop of gardening wraps around the space, making it the identity of the program. The juxtaposition of different elements of a space formed by gardening, along with the harder edges of the built form, takes away the experience of stark difference in the scapes. The research thus takes shape in identifying the range of such thresholds in the urban fabric of Mumbai and the way in which the density of the built environment softens. 




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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