Sem 05 / Form and Space Studies
Ontologies and Genealogies
What is a police station?

Dushyant Asher 

The Genealogy Studio 2025–26, focuses on the question, ‘What is a police station?’. It undertakes genealogical studies of key shifts in the structures, functions, and public imaginaries of policing, and their resultant spatial typologies. Through an analysis of these shifts, the studio approaches a selected swatch of the city in Borivali West, Mumbai, at the intersection of multiple policing conditions—the formal municipal police station, dispersed surveillance infrastructures, and informal or community-based mechanisms of control and safety.

Through an ethnographic reading of these overlapping conditions, students identify and construct relevant contemporary programmes for policing that extend beyond conventional institutional frameworks. Using collage as a primary method, the studio assembles fragments from archival material, field observations, media representations, and spatial typologies to generate speculative architectural conditions. These collaged constructs operate as both analytical and projective tools, enabling students to reconfigure relationships between authority, publicness, and space.

Through iterative processes of collage, diagramming, and pattern analysis derived from genealogical studies, students develop spatial propositions for emergent forms of the police station. These propositions are further elaborated into architectural strategies, articulated through material assemblies that speculate on new aesthetic and civic imaginaries of policing.

More work from the course can also be found here.

Svapnil Pithava

Ishwari Gorwadkar