Sem 05 / Culture Studies
South Asian Architecture and Urbanism: Spatial Agency

Richa Shah  

The South Asian Architecture and Urbanism course aims to develop conceptualizations of architecture in the region. The course was divided into two parts. The first part discussed the problems with present historiographies of South Asian Architecture and Urbanism and went on to develop conceptual categories through which a new critical understanding of architecture and urbanism in South Asia may be formulated. The course looked at South Asian architecture through the frameworks of pre-colonial, colonial, modern, and contemporary spatial logics, understanding terms such as Modernity, Critical Regionalism, Affordances, Transactional Capacities, Incrementality, Difference, Gendering, etc. to read South Asian Architecture and Urbanism through.

The second part was a reading seminar from the course ‘Fraternity as Infrastructure’ that discussed multiple ways of looking at the idea of fraternity and what it means to have spatial agency in architectural design. Through selected readings, the students were introduced to diverse concepts such as deep democracy, the communitarian trap, the commons, and imagined communities, which provided insight into how different scholars have previously perceived the role of "community." The students presented core arguments, key ideas, and insights from their chosen texts to theorise space before actually visiting the site. These readings were important for them to understand how space is produced through interactions among communities, stakeholders, and institutions, examining the ideas of claims and authority, difference and spatial justice, and positioning design as a participatory process rooted in community knowledge and lived experiences.

For the final exercise, students synthesized their understanding of the community into a 1500-word essay, drawing upon direct interactions with community members, case studies from the South Asian region, theoretical frameworks from the readings, and the process of design development in their studio.