Grand Challenge Seminar Series: Disruption, Displacement and Heritagification in Lahore’s Walled City

While in some instances, such as earthquakes or wars, disruption and displacement of many are visible to all, when global capital in search of economic rents arrives in closely-knit, largely self-sustaining communities, disruption and displacement often appears as a desirable outcome. In this paper, we study a particular instance in which such a traditional community is undergoing disruption and displacement: the World Bank and Government of Punjab sponsored ‘sustainable development’ of the nearly 2000 year old Walled City of Lahore (WCL). The ‘Sustainable Development of Walled City Lahore Project’ (SDWCLP) has resulted in dramatic changes in the social and economic lives of the enclave’s residents with the relationship of the WCL and the outside world transforming. In this paper, we explore the discursive and material strategies that render this enclave ‘legible’ for tourists in a process we label heritagification. We discuss how the production of this legibility privileges investor interests over those of poor residents while introducing a new calculus into the social milieu. In doing so, we identify how heritagification’ or tourist gentrification is justified by a moralizing and reductive discourse of ‘heritage’ conservation, which in turn renders disruption and displacement desirable in the eyes of powerful stakeholders.

In the second part of this seminar, Kamal Munir will share his experiences on publishing research on grand challenges in our top management journals.

Grand Challenge seminar series

The aim of this seminar series is to foster high-level discussions within ERIM on grand societal challenges (the reduction of poverty, increasing equality, combating climate change) and the opportunities that these provide for management and organizational research. The focus on grand challenges aligns with the interest of the business-society department on sustainability and the UN's sustainable development goals, but the series is also specifically designed in such a way that it should have a broader appeal to other ERIM research groups. Specifically, we aim to invite leading researchers from business schools around the world who connect grand challenges to mainstream management and organizational theory and manage to publish their work in the leading journals of our field.