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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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"open" to "public" spaces in Amravati

Publics and Spaces
Sapna Chopda, 2024


 As small cities expand, the urban fabric changes through processes like abandonment, retrofitting, and the introduction of new infrastructure. Despite these shifts, the open, unbuilt spaces among constructed areas remain constant, constantly adapting to their surroundings and shaping new social interactions. 

Amravati, a second-tier city in Maharashtra, historically confined within the walls of Juni Amravati, is undergoing rapid transformation. The new developments are “hardening” the landscape by introducing infrastructure-driven public spaces that reshape the city’s identity and alter how residents and visitors experience the city. Engagement with public spaces deepens when they become part of daily life, integrating into everyday activities. These open spaces between the built forms convert into un-demarcated public spaces and become available for a variety of public activities like hawking, recreation, playing, walking, gathering, etc.  Communities share and everyday inhabitations allow for many more activities to happen, which gives it its public nature. However, in new kinds of developments, land boundaries are demarcated for a specific purpose. This creates a kind of recreational space that restricts multiple activities and erases multiple claims and temporal occupations.

Hence, the thesis aims to study what truly keeps the public nature of these spaces in terms of their multiplicity and openness of use. I would like to open up an understanding of how open spaces convert themselves into public spaces, in Amravati. They are not formally designated as public spaces, but they naturally evolve into communal environments through everyday use and interaction, evolving notions of publicness and new relationships. As the built environment of these spaces has evolved, how have these spaces continued to change, adapt and define the shifts of these informal spaces in different settings offering insights into the organic processes that shape public spaces and their role in creating social interactions, publicness and its grades, inclusivity, flexible environments that resonate with the evolving needs of the community.



Read also under ‘Publics and Spaces’:

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Enclosed opens


Publics and Spaces
Akshada Dhamapurkar, 2021
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Urban grounds


Publics and Spaces
Alisha Jain, 2021
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Food institutions: spatial and social networks

Publics and Spaces
Chetasvi Patel, 2024
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Crowds and publics


Publics and Spaces
Gunjan Shah, 2022
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Spaces of dissent/protest



Publics and Spaces
Maryam Sheikh, 2021
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Changing publics and the making / emergence of new cultural spaces


Publics and Spaces
Neel Shah, 2022
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Narratives of public line in Asar Mahal: histories, events and everyday

Publics and Spaces
Nisha Shinde, 2024
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The architecture of public spaces



Publics and Spaces
Ritu Naik, 2021
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Architecture of repose: characteristics and perceptions of open spaces

Publics and Spaces
Rushabh Dedhia, 2019
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Aesthetics of erasure



Publics and Spaces
Sakshi Sawant, 2022
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Interpretative capacities of builtform


Publics and Spaces
Shachi Shah, 2019
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Public as assemblage in Sharjah

Publics and Spaces
Tanushree Bhagwat, 2024
To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
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