Turning Walled City Lahore into a spectacle: the unintended consequences of heritage conservation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper sheds light on the antecedents and consequences of the much lauded ‘Sustainable Development of Walled City Lahore Project’ (SDWCLP), which was initiated by the Walled City Lahore Authority (WCLA) to conserve the tangible and intangible heritage of the ancient core of modern Lahore, which was seen to be facing destruction from commercial growth and neglect. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research, we show how the WCLA sought to transform Lahore’s Walled City into a heritage tourism destination aiming to bring economic growth yet conserve its cultural heritage. Drawing upon critical heritage studies and Guy Debord’s concept of the ‘spectacle’, we illustrate how a convergence of structural violence and neoliberal government policies created the conditions in which a project like SDWCLP was made possible. The SDWCLP’s mission to preserve heritage attempted to commodify local life and historical sites and monuments for tourist consumption, turning the Walled City into a curated display detached from the lived life of the city. In shining a light on the unintended consequences of such heritage preservation projects, we add to and build upon the work of critical heritage studies scholars who study local class dynamics, tourism investment, planning discourses and sustainability of historical settlements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".