Public Art as Soft Infrastructure: Sustaining Intangible Cultural Heritage in Urbanising Mysore

Cultural practices thrive in urban environments due to the sensory aspects of daily experiences and ordinary urban life. These conditions, however, will be lost as rapid urbanisation continues. Heritage policy preserving documents and structures has not prevented heritage loss due to emphasising past preservation over practice continuation into the present. This critical gap highlights the urgent necessity of grounded empirical inquiry into how spatial, material, and sensory shifts directly disrupt living cultural practices. This research develops a theory that public art functions as "soft" infrastructure to support cultural practice by providing practitioners control over design and governance. By positioning public art squarely within urban governance and municipal planning, the paper establishes a novel conceptual bridge between cultural policy and municipal infrastructure provision. The argument rests on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mysore involving interviews with artisans and public art stakeholders. Additionally, comparative case studies from India's Madhubani region, Morocco's Fez, Mexico's Oaxaca, and Indonesia's Yogyakarta illustrate heritage infrastructure failures across spatial, environmental, social, institutional, and material dimensions. These empirical observations directly support a clear analytical model that conceptually links physical space, artisan agency, and living heritage. These failures informed a framework focused on multisensory experience, community co-creation, and transforming physical space. Artisan governance directly determines whether public art promotes living practices or becomes an aesthetically pleasing spectacle. The study provides a transferable model for safeguarding ICH in secondary global South cities.