2023_Krisha Kothari — SEA Archives

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

Everyday religiosity and housing in suburban Mumbai

Urban Religiosities
Krisha Kothari, 2023

How does the intersection of everyday religiosity and real estate regulation shape spatiality and life in a suburban neighborhood in Mumbai? At stake in this question lies the challenge to articulate the ways in which the spatiality of standardized, repetitive units of mass housing in a suburban neighborhood undergoing intense redevelopment produces frictions and opportunities to mediate the differences arising from the practices of everyday religiosity.

I explored this question in Daulat Nagar, a suburban neighborhood in Mumbai, where I resided for 20 years between 2001 - 2020. Daulat Nagar emerged as a privately plotted bungalow scheme in the 1950s housing Sindhi and Punjabi refugees alongside households from Gujarati and Maharashtrian linguistic communities. In the 1980s, it transformed into low-rise apartments and Gujarati and Marwari households increased in number. Post 2005, drawing upon Mumbai’s regulation of incentive Floor Space Index, it is transforming into high-rise apartments that are predominantly inhabited by Jain households.

I conducted the fieldwork for this research in three stages between May-July 2023. I firstly walked along the neighborhood mapping intensity of housing redevelopment practices in the neighborhood categorizing them decadally. I followed these walks by reinserting myself as a ‘fly on the wall’ listening to everyday conversations and gossip in the neighborhood. These unraveled stories of extensions, retrofits, redevelopment, mobility, enterprise, amenities, building services, and sales and rehabilitation---all of which intersected with everyday religious discourse and practice in the neighborhood. I chose to detail out four stories that emerged in the overlap of these two reconnaissance studies.

The first story, Punya ka kaam (Virtuous deeds), discusses how kinship networks mobilize the discourse of everyday Jain religiosity to tap paradoxically into the community’s financial capacities to advance housing redevelopment business. The second story, Ghar Upashray (Habitation for Jain monks), how an apartment presents spatial affordances to retrofit an Upashray, and in the process, unravels how retrofits of an institutional programme in a domestic space transforms the commons of an apartment type disrupting privacy and routines of the building’s residents. The third story, Kalank Lag Jaayega (Reputation shall be blemished), discusses how spatial stacking in the apartment type lends to olfactory experiences of cooking, and in turn, how the proximities of vegetarian and non-vegetarian households in densifying neighborhoods result into social frictions. The fourth story, Vaastu Anusar (According to Vaastu Shastra), discusses the design of modifications to the apartment type through the logic of vaastu shastra exceeding the city’s development control regulations. These unapproved modifications attempt to invent spatial affordances in the standardized apartment type that customize formal configurations to align with the differences produced by the practices of everyday religiosity. The fifth story, Khuli jagah nahi hai (There is no open space), discusses the provision of amenities in the apartment type that address the everyday practices of Jain religiosity and construct a new ground for public space in the neighborhood.

I argue that the designs of the form and configuration of the apartment type—situated in logics of universality, efficiency and standardization—are unable to absorb the cultural practices of everyday religious difference. It articulates the design provocation: How can the architecture of the apartment type be rearticulated to absorb and hold the everyday practices emanating from religious difference?

Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:

Spatialities of everyday heritage

Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijaykar, 2020

Remembering ghar: continuities of memory

Memory and Belonging
Anika Pugalia, 2024

Architecture of a monument: Vasai fort

Memory and Belonging
Chinmay Kadwadkar, 2018

Architecture and memory: remembering home in involuntary dislocation

Memory and Belonging
Dhruv Chavan, 2018

On Sindhi refugees: making home in Jalgaon

Memory and Belonging
Khushboo Tejwani, 2024

Retrofitted domesticities

Memory and Belonging
Nikunj Dedhia, 2020

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

Memory and Belonging
Rutu Kelekar, 2018

Spatiality of remembrance: encounters between the native and urban

Memory and Belonging
Tanishqa Rodrigues, 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.