Few cities in South Asia carry as much layered history as Lahore, and fewer still have watched that history erode as visibly. Centuries of Mughal grandeur, colonial reordering and postcolonial neglect have left Pakistan’s second city at a crossroads. Now, a government-backed authority is betting that the answer lies in its past.
The Lahore Authority for Heritage Revival (LAHR), established under the current Punjab government, is overseeing what officials describe as the most ambitious restoration programme the city has seen in modern times. Heading the initiative is former Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, a native Lahori and the president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N, lending the effort considerable political weight and, its proponents argue personal conviction.
The LAHR’s mandate is wide in scope. On the ground, it translates to the rehabilitation of Lahore’s historic city gates, including Delhi Gate, Taxali Gate, Mochi Gate and Shah Alam Gate, alongside façade restoration and streetscape improvements across the Walled City. Mughal-era monuments, including the Lahore Fort, the Shalimar Gardens, the Tomb of Jahangir and Kamran’s Baradari, are undergoing active conservation. Historic commercial precincts such as Anarkali Bazaar, Neela Gumbad, Paan Gali and Bakhshi Market are also being revitalized.
The programme does not stop at bricks and mortar. Underground parking facilities, pedestrian corridors, drainage rehabilitation and the rerouting of electrical wiring along Mall Road and Circular Road are being introduced to reduce the visual and infrastructural burden on heritage zones, a balancing act between liveability and preservation that urban planners elsewhere have often struggled to manage. In a more symbolic vein, the authority has commissioned commemorative projects honouring Lahore’s literary figures, including the short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto and journalist-poet Shorish Kashmiri, a nod to a city that was once as celebrated for its intellectual life as for its architecture.
To understand why the LAHR exists, it helps to understand what Lahore lost and how. The city traces its origins to antiquity. By the late medieval era, it was known across the subcontinent as a city of gardens; under the Mughals, it was an imperial capital whose monuments rivalled those of Agra and Delhi. The city that greeted Pakistan’s founding in 1947 was, by most accounts, the largest, most cosmopolitan and most culturally sophisticated urban centre in the new country.
What followed was a long unravelling. Partition severed Lahore from its demographic and economic hinterland overnight. The wars of 1965 and 1971 added further disruption. The Ravi River, the city’s historical lifeline, was gradually starved of water through upstream diversions, leaving what was once a navigable river reduced to a depleted channel. Decades of unchecked urban growth brought housing societies, high-rise construction and mega-infrastructure projects, underpasses, overhead bridges and six-lane motorways, that reshaped Lahore’s skyline and paved over its green cover. The minarets and tomb domes that once defined the city’s horizon now compete with a newer skyline that seems to have been built in deliberate ignorance of the one it replaced.
The ecological toll has been no less severe. Large-scale residential developments, among them Defence Housing Authority and its peers, have steadily consumed the forests and green belts on Lahore’s periphery, clearing mature trees and displacing native wildlife to make way for walled communities and manicured lawns. The city of gardens, it turns out, has been losing its gardens to the very class of people most likely to romanticise them.
The result is a city that many of its own residents describe as increasingly unrecognizable. The LAHR represents, at least in principle, a formal acknowledgment that Lahore’s cultural and historical identity is not incidental to Pakistan’s national story but central to it. That acknowledgment, advocates say, has been a long time coming. Whether the authority can deliver on that promise at scale remains to be seen. Heritage restoration projects in South Asian cities have a mixed record, often stalling on questions of funding continuity, community displacement and the tension between tourism and lived urban life.
For now, cranes are up at the Lahore Fort. The gates of the Walled City are being re-faced. And a city that has survived Mughal emperors, colonial administrators and partition is, once again, being asked to reinvent itself, this time by looking back.