Pooja Ugrani

Tekton
Tekton: Volume 9, Issue 1, September 2022
pp. 62 – 83

Pooja Ugrani graduated from Sir J.J. College of Architecture, Mumbai and has a PG diploma in Indian Aesthetics from Jnana Pravaha, Mumbai. She has completed her M.Arch. Degree by research, partly by papers, from Mumbai University where she analysed the expression of ownership at the boundaries of domains in urban mass housing. Her areas of interest are urban exploration, architecture through origami etc. Her research explores how human behaviour and the urban built environment impact each other. She is currently Associate Professor, at the Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Design, REVA University, Bangalore.
poojaugrani2020@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

The entrance of a house is a stage where residents perform expressions of how and why they own the space that they call home. This space tells you stories of function, of fears, of everyday routine and planning for the future. It also tells people to stay away, to beware, that if you were to harm my home, there will be consequences. It talks of celebrations, many a times common ones where many entrance spaces join hands and become a collective stage for festivities.

This paper narrates stories about a collection of such entrances in apartment housing, colloquially termed as ‘colonies’ or ‘societies’ in the urban Indian context, and how they define its residents and their identity. For this, a total of 106 houses across five housing projects in Navi Mumbai were studied by filling up questionnaires, inventories and taking detailed photographs of the individual houses as well as the compound areas of the various housing colonies formed within the housing projects. Site activities, spatial appropriations and areas for congregation that aided friendship formation were documented using photographs. The paper also puts forth various factors that affect the expression of ownership at the entrances of houses in community living in urban India and makes a case for the existence of this very pertinent architectural element in the mutating housing typologies of the future.

KEY WORDS:
Expression of Ownership, Urban India, Community Living, Entrances