South Asian Landscapes
Conversations on contemporary building practices across South Asia
an infra-regional e-symposium between June-October 2020


South Asian Architecture and Urbanism has remained an area of long-term investigation for the School of Environment & Architecture. Along with the continuing historical threads, cultural similarity and shared colonial past, South Asian countries also struggle towards articulating a distinct criticality in shaping their built environment today. How can architecture mediate cultural and political forces that emerge from our common past? What role may architects and spatial practitioners play in building relevant futures for South Asia? How can we respond to the distinct social tectonics that shape our people and place? What practices of the built environment from the past and present remain unrecognized in South Asia and how can these be intelligently deployed into a meaningful future? These are questions that the SEA City Conversation hopes to address over the online semester-long series, titled “South Asian Landscapes”; planned in the light of a virtual borderless environment compelled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In recognizing the virtue of such borderless suspension, geographical and political impediments can be bypassed towards establishing stronger dialogue and understanding of building practices in the South Asian region. Through a series of conversations curated across its adjoining borders in surveying the contemporary built environment, institutional networks towards nurturing a collaborative environment of research and intellectual exchange may be nurtured, that may help prepare a preliminary ground from where the spirit of post-colonial inquiry into architectural and urban research for the South Asia may be securely launched.