Post by My Liveable City

MLC shares the stage at USC School of Architecture, California. . Lecture by: Vinayak Bharne (Director and Executive Editor, MyLiveableCity) . Lecture Date: March 4, 2026 . Lecture Insights: Vinayak presented 15 self-initiated projects built over his career — work that began without clients, driven by advocacy and critical inquiry. The thread running through all of them: coexistence — between formal and informal urbanisms, heritage and ecology, and the Global South and Global North. . Key ideas: 1. Architecture begins with observation, not design. Many communities already possess extraordinary spatial knowledge. The architect's role is to understand where intervention is useful — not impose it. 2. Buildings are a small piece of a bigger urban puzzle. Architecture without that broader perspective can actively harm — destroying the social structure of a place. 3. Sacred networks as social justice tools. A decade-long study of temples across India identified what Vinayak calls the "sacredscape" — sacred nodes that become centres of daily life for communities municipal planning has failed. 4. Conservation is ecological, not just structural. At the Taj Mahal, the real conservation challenge is the Yamuna river — whose water maintains the monument's foundations. 5. Indigenous water systems as climate infrastructure. Ancient subterranean channels across the Global South — qanats, khetteras — offer models for decentralised water distribution that modern cities are only beginning to rediscover. . "The solutions to the future will not come from affluent nations alone — but from a feedback loop between different societies." . . USC School of Architecture ; Vinayak Bharne, AICP . #UrbanDesign #GlobalUrbanism #MyLiveableCity