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Research


The spirit of the research activity at the Centre is to produce new knowledge where its applicability is not a defining imperative. However, the research may be useful for pedagogy, policy, practice of making buildings, awareness creation, etc.

RESEARCHERS’ PROGRAMME
The Centre shall host a group of researchers every year to work with various research clusters. They will also go through courses offered by the Centre and develop capacity in spatial research and pedagogy.

The current research clusters at the Centre are: 
 


This cluster is engaged in exploring the emerging dynamics in the urbanisation process in India and its experience. The research in this cluster aims towards developing nuanced readings of urbanization processes, forms and politics in India beyond narratives of ‘crises’ and ‘collapse’ that build on thin quantitative and ....
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This cluster aims at developing a conceptualisation of spatiality in the subcontinent beyond the extant frameworks shaped by colonial stylistic discourses, post independence ideas of identity and locality and contemporary conceptualizations around socio-political causality and informality. The nationalistic imagintaions currently framing
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The uncertainties associated with menacing global environmental changes such as deglaciation and proliferating pathogens present capacities to transpose life to a putative tipping point of habitat change, or a new normal. Design and planning fields largely attempt to futureproof places from this tipping point ‘all at once,’ and thus sketch  ...
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The cluster is premised on the discussion that current and conventional systems / processes of making ‘things’ (including construction) are hijacked by industrialised and machinic systems providing no space for independent / autonomous agencies. This has an impact on the ‘things’ themselves and engagements with them. The cluster aims at ...
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Visual Culture


The Visual Culture cluster at SEA aims to set up a drawing culture in the school that is interrogative and reflective and where all manner of constructions and expressions of drawing are seen as a means to ask questions, make arguments, challenge institutional ways of learning and become documents of new knowledge. SEA wishes to......
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Covid Glossary

Transmissions, medical efficacy, sanitization, immunisation, de-densification, sterilisation have been common themes of engaging with pandemics. We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society....
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Educational Ecosystem of Architecture in India:A Review
Currently, architectural institutions are intensely regulated and resource starved, with no capacity to interrogate
architectural methods or to produce new knowledge. They train architects in orthographic projections; basic construction, quantification, estimation and specification; planning of spaces based on functional logistics; and stylistic thinking in history. There is no theoretical basis for understanding space, its production, its experience and its role in shaping behaviour.....

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Youth on the Move: Performing Urban Space in Global South


Youth on the Move is a research project initiated by scholars Ying Cheng, Min Tang and architect-curator Anuj Daga, that has received the Urban Seminar Series 2023 Award by the Urban Studies Foundation, UK. The project seeks to  investigate an urbanity that youth produce on the move - through short- and long term mobilities. The project observes emerging socio-spatial practices of youth in African and Asian contexts, and examines their modes of moving and meaning-making through an embodied politics of performance.

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