Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on the author’s participation and interaction in heritage walks around ruins and monuments in the old city of Hyderabad; the paper examines the regeneration of symbolic landscapes and heritage trails as an emplaced experience of rapid urban restructuring and city development.

Paper Abstract:

This paper emerges from my research on the politics of making heritage sites in urban spaces. Focusing on the theme of ‘place-making’ against the more significant historical backdrop of monuments and ruins, the paper asks how one thinks of the conservation and materialization of urban space as a particular moment in urban development. Cities are associated with developing and rebuilding material landscapes. Service economies and capitalist expansions increasingly affect and structure the city’s built space. How important are the city’s ruins for the city’s future? While the representational politics underlying architecture preservation finds reiteration in identity and nation formation debates, the continuous making of built space and how people inscribe meanings to their social world in their everyday lived practices are understated. The paper builds on the author’s participation and interaction in heritage walks to ruins and monuments in the old city center and its neighborhood in Hyderabad, India, to understand the burgeoning trend of heritage walks in the city as a response to the staggering city renovations. Equating the flaneur (Walter Benjamin) to urban heritage walkers, the paper examines the regeneration of the symbolic landscapes and heritage trails as an emplaced experience of rapid urban restructuring and city development.