Abstract:
The Walled City of Lahore continues to have a declining and relatively poor residential population, despite the fact that it provides increasingly cheap homes and job opportunities. Reasons for this decline are many - interpreted through the history of the walled cities social and political economy; and spatial changes it has undergone in the larger context of Lahore. Certain trends in the course taken by national economic processes have also contributed to this decline. At the same time the Walled City has turned into a dynamic powerhouse of economic production; most benefits of which go to nonresidential populations, in the larger context of a generally dysfunctional metropolis of close to ten million people. To what extent can the Walled Citys residual heritage help in shoring up a declining sense of self-identity among the myriad stakeholders: the residents, the citizens of the larger city, of the province of Punjab, of Pakistan, of the World? What constitutes an urban heritage is an issue that underlies discussions in this third serious attempt at urban heritage conservation in old Lahore. Based on a close-up study of the residents of a small lane in the Walled City, this paper examines whether and to what qualitative extent the sense of \"heritage\" still resides in the stakeholders; confronted by change, poverty, and the externalities of a heritage conservation project. An incipient urban conservation project is described with ramifications on the residents, on those they are pitted against, specializing in the conservation of and on the future of the Walled City itself.
Page(s):
43-55
DOI:
DOI not available
Published:
Journal: Proceedings of the 6th Seminar on Urban and Regional Planning, Volume: 0, Issue: 0, Year: 2011