Lahore has always known what it is. The question, for a long time, was whether its institutions knew it too. The Lahore Heritage Areas Revival, known as LAHAR, is the clearest answer yet. Under Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the programme commits an estimated Rs 50 billion across phased interventions, treating the old city not as a relic to be preserved behind glass, but as living infrastructure to be revitalised.

The precedents are instructive. When Bologna restored its historic centre in the 1970s, it became the first city to treat heritage neighbourhood residents as stakeholders rather than obstacles, a model the UN later held as a global standard. When Medellín invested in public space and cultural infrastructure in its most neglected districts, it won the Urban Land Institute's award for the world's most innovative city in 2013. Istanbul's Beyoğlu corridor, once congested and in decline, was transformed through pedestrianisation into one of Europe's most visited urban stretches, anchoring Türkiye's $46 billion heritage tourism economy. George Town in Penang earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 2008 and saw tourism revenues rise by over 300 percent within a decade through the adaptive reuse of its shophouse districts. The lesson across all of them is consistent: cities that invest in their........

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