The tremendous growth of urbanised space during the 21st century is dramatically visible in the landscapes of greater Mumbai. Housing shortage, environmental degradation, and governance failure are all unmistakable features of this growth. Architects have played a crucial activist and pedagogical role in making the contours of these crises visible, framing their causes, and offering ideas to government and citizens. These efforts take shape in a wave of architect-led activities and institutions that move beyond the traditional architectural studio model. Across South Asia, new institutional forms are evolving alongside hybrid practices involving designers, social thinkers, activists, and artists working collaboratively to analyse and propose new forms of spatial practice, geared to the greater collective good.

In this short three-day visit (December 8 to 10, 2025), co-hosted by the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), Mumbai and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT) in the lead up to the Triennial’s third edition (SAT03), we explored, celebrated, and learned from the work of numerous innovative practices and institutions across South Asia. This conversation was loosely framed around the theme of SAT’s third edition, titled Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures.

Our hope is to initiate a dialogue and an exchange between Sharjah and South Asia—one that will inform, and be a part of, the third edition’s effort to reclaim architecture as a civic practice rather than a purely technological one.

Curated by an anthropologist, this edition specifically highlights practices that centre people, rather than technologies, and reframes architecture as a social, ecological, and epistemological practice, rather than a purely aesthetic or infrastructural one.

We invited practitioners to share their engagements with the wider cultural landscape of arts, aesthetics, architecture, urbanism, economy, environment, society, and politics. The workshop hinged around the question: what have been the participants’ key learnings and realisations in the production of space, and how did they envision its evolution in the coming years?

Find programme videos here.