Onaiza Arshad

This project is an archival and ethnographic study of people’s everyday interactions with the visual imagery and built environment of Andaroon-Shehr, an ancient walled city in Lahore, Pakistan. It interrogates the routine visual and material mediations, through which social actors, ranging from residents and tourists to state authorities and conservationists, participate in and contest the fashioning of Andaroon-Shehr into a national heritage site. It questions how and why the production of the space into a museumized relic of the past also frames it as disconnected from contemporary urban tensions over development, migration, religious discrimination, and ethnic violence and brings these consistently separated conversations into one frame of analysis. The research foregrounds these lesser-known entanglements and probes at how they can provide novel insights into Lahore’s urban history and development, and how they can make Andaroon-Shehr speak to concerns beyond a sanitized past. It emphasizes mediations, processes, and everyday engagements, exploring how taken-for-granted practices participate in long-standing histories of oppression and urban exclusions. Crucially, it homes in on disruptive moments within such routine mediations of Andaroon-Shehr, offering glimpses into its muted histories, imagery, and discourses and creating opportunities to interrogate dominant historical narratives and their impacts on contemporary urban life.