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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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Socio-spatialities of infrastructures: Stories from four residential types in Lower Parel, Mumbai

Infrastructures
Neha Dalvi, 2023


The term 'infrastructure' is primarily used to recognize systems such as water pipelines, electrical systems, and waste management that are installed to ensure the functioning of the city. These same systems at the level of buildings are referred to as 'service systems.' These infrastructural services are observed as the backbone of a building and are responsible for the functioning of the same.

While infrastructural systems are typically perceived and evaluated based on their functional and technical aspects, it is crucial to recognize that these are social systems as well that play a pivotal role in shaping the social dynamics within various housing typologies; the most well-known of them being a slum, a chawl, a cooperative housing society, and a luxury high-rise apartment. The contemporary residential building-making practices demonstrate a noticeable shift in the formal arrangement of its infrastructural systems and elements. This shift is evident in the way social life revolves around these infrastructural systems. The levels of sociality and technicality are different for each of the building types.

The thesis aims to analyze how residents from different building types negotiate and generate ways to utilize the infrastructural systems as social systems and understand what relationships are produced through these practices. The study explores how infrastructural systems, such as water pipe systems, electricity, and waste management, shape life and living in various residential building typologies in Lower Parel–a dense urban region in Mumbai.

A comprehensive understanding of the various socio-technical frameworks inherent in each of the four built forms was gained through thorough observations of residents’ interactions within each space. This involved extensive mapping of conversations, gossip, conflicts, and negotiation methods employed by the residents.

The thesis thus argues that infrastructural systems in residential building types are socio-technical systems that have the potential to produce socialities of various kinds. The spatial arrangement of these systems in each building type plays a significant role in shaping social relations. The study further offers new analytical parameters to understand these basic building infrastructures as socio-technical systems.  

Parameters such as accessibility, user rights, openness, room for improvisation, boundary making, user rights and security help us understand how infrastructure systems cultivate frictions, polarities, friendships, and informal surveillance, thereby reconceptualizing the idea of infrastructures as social systems that are produced by the inhabitants themselves.




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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