ABSTRACT
With the global cultural preservation discourse underscoring UNESCO’s 2011 Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach there is a need to revisit the monument-centric conservation approach that forms a part of India’s colonial legacy. The HUL approach shifts the focus from the monument to the historic city that provides the former a setting. Epitomizing the Throsbyian ‘Cultural Ecosystem’ construct, with a large corpus of tangible, intangible, living and non-living heritage, there is more to the Indian historic city than the monument. The HUL Recommendation extends the notion of heritage beyond the monument to encompass the larger landscape posing new conservation and management challenges to heritage managers given the dynamic nature of the urban environment. In such a scenario, this chapter revisits the historic city with its rapidly transforming development framework that is also a receptacle of the past represented by the monument. By examining historic cities, it explores how the past and the future can be reconciled so that heritage can play a meaningful role in terms of the here and the now in the midst of the ever-changing and bustling reality of the historic city.
