Mirya,
Ratnagiri, Maharashtra

Mirya is a village caught between its enduring history as a settlement subsisting on the basis of a primary economy of fishing and its new role as an ancillary outpost of the city of Ratnagiri, serving its transforming economic needs. It lies at the outskirts of the city, in the district of Ratnagiri, firmly in the fertile coastal belt of the Konkan. This early stage of urbanisation is what we see, where the idea of “local” or "traditional" (built form, construction detail, cultural object) is still felt keenly, however, a spatial transformation is seen as well, in the emergence of specific living rooms / bedrooms / dining rooms within the space of the house, in the new materials used in construction practices, in the hardening of the boundaries between the outside and inside of the house, etc.
The study comes to describe it as an “urbanising flux” where one can see the village’s environment, practices, and workforms all rapidly evolving. To hold the architecture of this flux, the settlement studies module produced a large map that identifies that shift, finds its evidence, and draws it in order to see not just a survey of its building practices and houseforms, but also its everyday, its routines and customs, and the relationships between builtform and social form.