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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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Extensions: urban life beneath transit infrastructure

Humanising infrastructure
Keerat Kaur Gill, 2024


 ‘Extensions’ explores the multiple spatial practices underneath transit infrastructures and how these spatial practices extend transit infrastructures beyond their intended goal to create a spatial resource for local and city level people. Its larger aim is to move away from the recent gardening projects that seem to dominate the urban imagination of spaces underneath flyovers.

For this, three flyovers with different practices were studied in three different localities of Mumbai starting from Mahalaxmi in South Mumbai to the newly developing suburb of Kashigaon and Mira Road just outside Mumbai’s boundaries. Each case offered a different situation: A labour market underneath the Kashimira Flyover situated near the junction of the Kashigaon market; an interstate bus and daily parcels booking agencies beneath the Borivali National Park Flyover which is a junction for interstate and intercity buses; and lastly the car garages and mixed businesses allocated into defined galas underneath the Dr. Elijah Moses Bridge in Mahalaxmi in proximity to the racecourse, the Mahalaxmi railway station, Opera house market and the upper class neighbourhood.  

This thesis studies the underspaces of the flyovers and the multiplicity it affords apart from its designated primary function. It studies the everyday temporal shifts in the spatiality of the space; the claims and property forms that hold the space; and the forms of occupations and networks of different groups that extend the space beyond its monotony of a mere underbelly of a flyover.

The fieldwork findings for each case reveal that the 'underneath' can take on various forms such as: a historical space that evolves with the surrounding economy and communities in the case of Mahalaxmi; as a neglected space repurposed by individuals and communities from neighbouring areas of living, work and opportunities; as a space integrated into the movement of goods, people and capital in Borivali; and, finally, as a highly contested space of claims and property between its users as well as the government bodies at Kashimira.

At present, the government is trying to repurpose all the flyover spaces by introducing gardens in order to avoid encroachments which create a different sense of public than it is organically knitted within. In the cases above which tend to have a relation with its local and city fabric, the space extends into the context and responds to the day to day life of the locality unlike the garden spaces which are being introduced as spaces for leisure for the upcoming middle class communities. The thesis thus informs the question for the next stage: How can we develop and repurpose these spaces organically in order to respond to the urban life it is situated in?




Read also under ‘Humanising infrastructure’:

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Humanising infrastructure



Humanising infrastructure
Aakash Bhanushali, 2019
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Food streets, as infrastructure for the city: a study of the Khau Galis of the city

Humanising infrastructure
Hetvi Lapasia, 2019
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Infrastructure and altered spatialities: case of Pune metro


Humanising infrastructure
Samiksha Bhagde, 2024
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Dancing acts: street as theatre


Humanising infrastructure
Siddharth Chitalia, 2019
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Infrastructure transformations: impact on river ecology

Humanising infrastructure
Subodh Shelke, 2024  
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