SEA CITY is the School of Environment and Architecture’s outreach programme. SEA City organizes events, lectures, symposia and exhibitions in order to engage with the larger artistic and cultural discursive sphere within and outside the city. SEA City events are completely open to all public, and are attended by a diverse group of people including students, architects, professionals, academics and locals.

PROJECTIONS: ANTICIPATION AND ARCHITECTURE

SEA CONVERSATIONS 2026-27
Find YouTube Lecture Recordings here

This season’s conversation series Projections: Anticipation and Architecture delves in the discipline’s engagement with imagining futures. In exploring how architecture, and more broadly spatial practice, engages anticipation in envisioning futures, we ask: What forms of spatial and design thinking, and practices of hope, emerge when anticipation is understood as a widely distributed and negotiated capacity in turbulent worlds marked by deepening difference, colliding forcefields, uneven distribution of harm and risk, instability, uncertainty and fragility? How do architectural practices frame futures prospectively or retrospectively from the sociospatial conditions in which their projects are situated? These questions privilege as well as bring into conversation both research- and practice- based perspectives on the making of futures in this series.


sessions
July 10, 2026-  Dushkaal: Reframing time and futurity in the climate crisis
July 24 , 2026-  Migration, Material, Memory (upcoming)
August 08 , 2026-  a Sphinx, a Cormorant & other Forests Geographies of Imagination in participatory practices
August 21 , 2026-  One Thing Led to Another
September 04, 2026-  Elemental Coalitions 
October 09, 2026-  Look, Find and Play
October 23, 2026-  Affordances and Interventions: Creating Infrastructures of Conviviality and Care

session 2

Migration, Material, Memory

Friday, 24 July 2026,
5 pm to 7 pm

VENUE
School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

or join virtually via YouTube Live

AUR (Architecture Urbanism Research) aims to create meaning by understanding the production of architecture through migration, material, and memory. We craft histories of the future thoughtfully excavating histories of the past. AUR, और in Hindi, signifies the ‘other’ and signals a ‘prompt’. Architecture is perceived as a responsibility, and history as an instrument to facilitate cultural continuity, social equity, and material specificity. Architecture is seen as an intentional dialogue between space and time on one hand and material and labour on the other. The production of space remains a highly political act, contested through forces of migration, labour, climate, and colonialism.


discussants

Aurgho Jyoti
Aurgho Jyoti is the Founder and Creative Director of AUR (Architecture Urbanism Research), an architecture practice based in New Delhi and New York focused on cultural, social, and institutional projects. AUR’s recent awards include the AIA New York New Practice Award, the AIA Long Island Archi Award, and the India Humanitarian Hub Award. Aurgho was educated as an architect at Harvard, Cornell, and SPA Delhi and has worked in Pritzker Laureate offices including SOM, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Gehry Technologies, and Studio Fuksas. His work has been exhibited at the Centre for Architecture New York, Seattle Architecture Foundation, Astoria Heritage Museum, Harvard University, Red Fort, Alliance Française, and India Habitat Centre in Delhi.


moderated by
Apurva Talpade
(SEA)


This lecture series is partially supported by Urban Centre Mumbai and is free and open to public.

session 1

Dushkaal: Reframing time and futurity in the climate crisis

Friday, 10 July 2026,
5 pm to 7 pm

VENUE
School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

or join virtually via YouTube Live

From their vantage point on the frontlines of disaster, Indigenous Koli fishers from Maharashtra frame the fishing crisis they sense unfolding as also a climate crisis, one that’s long in the making. They articulate this slow disaster as matsya dushkaal (fish drought). By blurring the line between the everyday and the eventful disaster, dushkaal conceptually contests the reductive, event-based, crisis-planning approach of the government and makes claims to reframe the temporality of the climate crisis. The time of dushkaal, or long dyings that fishers live in intimate relation with, also foregrounds a loss that’s rarely acknowledged: that of ‘home’ and a mode or inhabitation, even while they continue to reside in place. In the everyday of dushkaal, fishers both anticipate a future but also insist on the need for other possible futures.

Dushkaal is one of a set of 8 entries in a forthcoming Climate Glossary that contributes to think from and with emic terms encountered in urban environments that provide a new grammar for reading and inhabiting time and space in already climate changed cities.


discussants

Lalitha Kamath
(Social scientiest and Urbanist)
Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance, urban informality and the environment. She is interested in reimagining planning practice by storytelling and drawing from fisher knowledge and the liquidities of the ocean. She teaches in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.


moderated by
Prasad Khanolkar
(SEA)


This lecture series is partially supported by Urban Centre Mumbai and is free and open to public.