Architecture In Urban Archipelagoes

Rishika Waghmare

Pooja Khairnar (PKinception) Suril Patel (Field Architects), Rohit Muzumdar (SEA), Prasad Khanolkar (SEA), Upendra Gurung (Studio Interweave), Gauri Satam (Studio UnTAG), Rupali Gupte (SEA), Anuj Daga (SEA), Laurent Fournier, Nipun Prabhakar (Dhammada Collective), Prasad Shetty (SEA) and Dushyant Asher (SEA).

Urbanisation is often imagined as arrival; a skyline appearing on the horizon, glass towers catching light, infrastructure drawing sharp lines across land. It carries an assumption of progress, of moving from less to more. But the conference at the School of Environment and Architecture unsettled this image. What if urbanisation is not an arrival, but a slow rearrangement? What if it is not about scale, but about relationships shifting over time?

The first panel quietly reframed the ground itself. Pooja Khairnar’s Hiwali School did not try to look “urban.” It simply sat within its soil, built of local brick, flexible enough to open, close, gather, teach. One teacher, many ages, one shared space. It suggested that urbanity can exist in the act of coming together; in the creation of a collective room. Rohit Mujumdar spoke of Uppada’s fragile coastline, where houses are repeatedly reshaped by cyclones and erosion. There, architecture is not permanence but resilience. Suril Patel of Field Architects reflected on vernacular systems not as frozen tradition, but as intelligence accumulated over time. Together, the panel asked: is urbanisation something we impose, or something we recognise in how communities already organise space?

The second panel turned toward habitation as a lived condition. Upendra Gurung described Sikkim’s clustered homes slowly giving way to vertical forms. The change is not only visual; it alters how neighbours relate, how land is touched, how air moves. Gauri Satam of Studio unTAG showed how fragments of a demolished temple could become structure for a new house, memory carried forward through material. Rupali Gupte questioned Mumbai’s fading street life, where blank facades replace watchful balconies and gendered negotiations of space grow sharper. Urbanisation, here, was not a map but a change in intimacy; in who sees and who is seen.

The final panel expanded the scale again. Laurent Fournier spoke of the Sundarbans, where land itself is unstable. Building becomes a conversation with water and soil. Nipun Prabhakar of the Dhammada Collective treated material experimentation as inquiry, showing that craft can question modernity. Prasad Shetty reminded the audience that urbanism is not owned by planners; it belongs to anyone attentive to how life gathers and disperses in space.

What emerged across the conference was not a new definition of urbanisation, but a softer one. Urbanisation is not a binary shift from rural to urban. It is an accumulation of adjustments — in material, in climate response, in migration, in aspiration. It is the slow thickening of networks across territories that refuse clear labels. Architecture, in these urban archipelagoes, becomes less about spectacle and more about listening. And perhaps that is the deeper shift: to see urbanisation not as dominance over land, but as a negotiation with it.