2024_Jayesha Chimanpure

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

In praise of idleness: city affordances

Beyond norms and routines
Jayesha Chimanpure, 2024

Cities are often considered spaces of productivity; therefore, they are thought of and designed through the logistics of efficiency leading to a productive outcome. A city is often seen as an engine of production but in this pace of city life, there is an interesting dimension that goes unnoticed—the non-productive dimension.

Non-productive activities are important for the social life of cities. They are an important part of the functioning of the city. The spatiality designed for work is seen as accommodating the idling individuals or so to speak, the time in between no work. This is true in the case of Kalbadevi, where there is an interaction between the building and the street due to the absence of the rigid boundary wall. This condition expands the notion of the street as a common space. The spatial affordance produces numerous forms of negotiation for the body to occupy that space and there exists a play between work and no work behaviour of the workers. However, in Vile Parle, the space use is limited only to vehicular and pedestrian movement and does not extend its inhabitation possibilities. It shows a lack of chances to hold the other activities and provides less opportunity for the body to mould itself due to its spatiality as the place is imagined through the idea of property and planning with crisp and sharp boundaries.

The thesis emphasises interpreting the logistics of non-productive activities and the spatial affordances that hold them and further identifies who these people are and why they do such activities. It understands the spatial configuration of the two contrasting sites, Kalbadevi and Vile Parle, that are present in the extreme contexts of the urban fabric that holds and doesn’t hold these activities. This thesis examines the built form, street, and social life as intrinsic elements within the urban context. It critiques the conception of a city as merely a productive engine designed solely for productive outcomes and proposes new approaches: even when cities are not explicitly designed to support non-productive activities, these activities persist. It asks what spatial forms can hold the occupancies of non-productive spaces and the whole gamut from work to non-work so as to make the city a less polarised and socially integrated space.

Read also under ‘Housing and Typology’:

What makes a home: a study of few homeless in Mumbai city

Housing and Typology
Aagam Shah , 2019

Reimagining the transforming Basti

House and Typology
Shreyansh Gupta, 2018

Of queering households

House and Typology
Trisha Salvi, 2018

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.