Abstract
This showcase introduces a visual-analytical diagnostic tool designed to decode the complex identities of sacred urban environments. Using Varanasi as its test site, the tool enables researchers, curators, and designers to analyse cities where religious imagination, scholarly history, and lived spatial transformation converge and sometimes conflict. At its core, the tool is built to diagnose and interpret the evolving genius loci—the spirit of place—within cities undergoing rapid modernisation and heritage pressures. The proposed tripartite framework moves across three interpretive lenses: Religious–mythological (textual cosmologies, pilgrimage circuits), Academic–historiographical (colonial surveys, scholarly readings), Lived–contemporary (urban projects, tourism flows, everyday rituals). By identifying single, double, and triple intersections between these layers—especially at key nodes like ghats or temple corridors—the tool reveals how sacred meaning is spatially constructed, disrupted, and reconstituted. Visualised at micro, meso, and macro scales, this approach offers a transferable model for understanding how sacred cities negotiate change while safeguarding their genius loci. Rather than prescribing preservation or progress, this tool offers a diagnostic method: a way to read tensions, overlaps, and absences that shape sacred urbanism. Presented through schematics, maps, and examples from Varanasi, the showcase will demonstrate how this method can be adapted to other sacred geographies—such as Jerusalem, Amritsar, or Kathmandu. The tool doesn’t just reveal how sacred cities evolve—it empowers us to see with care, to map meaning, and to curate continuity amid disruption.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
Creative and Cultural Technologies
KEYWORDS
Sacred Urbanism, Genius Loci, Tripartite Framework, Varanasi, Urban Transformation
