Urban Heritage Diamorphosis: Evolving Place-Identity of Kapaleeshwara Temple Precincts, Mylapore

Mylapore, in Chennai, India, known for its cultural and historical significance, is caught between its historical legacy and contemporary urban pressures. This paper engages with the morphological and cultural transformations unfolding in the Kapaleeshwara Temple precincts, where development initiatives coexist with efforts to preserve cultural memory. Through field observations, urban morphology mapping, and unstructured interviews conducted over two months, the study traces how shifts in the built typology reflect changing patterns of traditional performances and everyday experiences. Drawing on Aldo Rossi’s theories of urban artefacts, collective memory, and the analogical city, alongside Smrithi Srinivas’s concept of the urban performative complex, the paper examines how built morphology and public performances together shape evolving place-identity. It introduces the idea of ‘Urban Heritage Diamorphosis’- the morphological transformations that register evolving community values and place-associations under the combined influence of internal socio-cultural shifts and external development pressures. The paper concludes that recognising morphological change as evidence of evolving heritage values is essential for more community-centred heritage management practices.