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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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Emerging Urbanisation: The Story of Kolhapur’s Expansion

Expansions, Intensification and Form
Aditya Mahajan, 2024


City extents are often associated with narratives of lack, dependency, and various problems. However, they reveal a complex and dynamic nature that needs a nuanced understanding. Here, homemaking practices give rise to a peculiar built form, one that is distinct from both the formal city and the village. Therefore, this thesis asks the question: What forces shape the built form at the extents of the city? Exploring the relationship between generative forces, emerging urban and house forms, and the kinds of lives these forms produce.

The work examines four cases in the villages around Kolhapur city, developing their biographies through the residents' ideas of home. From complexities of land and caste-based segregation to family dynamics, one’s impulses, aspirations for dignified living, and the agency of people, to the obscure relationship between industries and agriculture, where farmers become entrepreneurs, the thesis tries to open up many such stories of shifts in urban landscapes. The emerging urban form consolidates life through diverse logics of culture, economy, politics, and environment. These narratives complicate current notions of city expansion, where the city is not expanding but rather the region is changing. The emergence of new landscapes, which appear to be an expanding city, are narratives of shifts and changes in urban environments, producing a distinct urban form and life. 

Thus, the extents are not the city's backyard but the very places from which the city functions. These emerging urban environments are distributed entities within the city forming an ecosystem in itself, developing into a scattered urban form; diminishing the idea of a central urban centre and its suburban region. Therefore, this thesis opens up a discourse on these emerging urban entities within the scattered fabric of contemporary cities, trying to put forth a newer conceptualisation of urbanisation.




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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