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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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Notes on homing: home-making practices of transitory youth in Mumbai

Narratives of Everyday
Radhika Malekar, 2023


Making a home.

It is a practice that every individual in the city engages in, for themselves and for the people around them in different ways. Cities have been expanding in the past few decades as more and more people are migrating to inhabit them, most of which occupy the city temporarily. These transitory bodies belong to all kinds of ages, castes, genders, religions and classes and their energetic selves inhabit spaces through everyday claims and appropriations. While all transitory lives are dynamic, the youth function through very different logics. The eminent question to then ask is, how do conventional housing logics in Mumbai lend spatialities to urban youths’ transitory practices of home-making?

The idea of short-term futures often lends itself to many different approaches towards home-making practices. These practices emerge from everyday lives of people. These practices extend, change, adapt and remain in a constant flux over a period of time. Some practices may be responses to basic matters like necessity of space due to multiple users/occupants or lack of monetary capacity; some may emerge from memories and associations, quirks and kicks, dreams and aspirations; while others might give away a sense of nonconformance to the orthodox society but all of these could be understood in nuanced ways.

Through this softness, the study aims to look at the lives of transitory youth beyond the lens of restrictions and regimentations which often addresses challenges like unaffordable rental rates, space constraints, ill-designed spaces, cultural nonacceptance and disparity, unavailability of basic amenities, lack of privacy and illegally imposed society rules. Rather, one enters into their worlds by seeking out the nature of their claims, transgressions and transformations, and opens up lives which the conventional logics of rules, restrictions and conformity fail to hold.

By drawing frameworks of understanding from James Gibson’s Theory of Affordances and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life: Spatial Practices, the thesis is invested in identifying and understanding the relationship between existing logics of conventional housing and the subversive ways through which they craft the spatialities of their everyday, through networks, relationships and friendships. The conventional housing majorly gets framed through the constrictive form of the tenure logics which tend to impose a certain kind of imagination of living for the migrant youth, where several actors like the owner, wardens (in some cases), sanitation staff/househelp, watchmen and the tenants themselves come into play. These imaginations are transgressed and appropriated through everyday practices which exist to engage with various institutions through tactics, while constantly questioning their methods. The study specifically looks at the lives of  four such youth and their home-making practices through a series of conversations, observations and gossip.




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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