Participatory Walking as an Alternative Heritage Practice in Two UNESCO World Heritage Cities: Bath and Lahore

Cities with rich histories hold complex, multi-layered and palimpsestic memories that often diverge from official narratives. This chapter examines the potential of participatory walking as a strategy to challenge and diversify official heritage narratives and create opportunities for agonistic discussions among citizens. The authors compare two contemporary participatory walking practices in the UNESCO-listed cities of Bath, United Kingdom, and Lahore, Pakistan. In both cities, free daily walking tours for tourists present carefully curated stories of sites as lieux de mémoires produced by brilliant civilisations at their height: Roman and Georgian empires in Bath and Mughal culture in Lahore. These narratives commodify both cities for tourism and tend to erase much of their diversity and the complex ways in which they have been impacted by British colonial legacies. After introducing both cities, the chapter sets out to analyse how the participatory walk ‘Sweet Waters’, created by the artist-researcher Richard White, and ‘Lahore ka Ravi’, initiated by academic and start-up founder Ghazi Taimoor, use participatory walking to create agonistic encounters that allow local citizens to disentangle their cities’ histories, discuss their perceptions of local memoryscapes and have their voices heard. The conclusion highlights the impact of the broader political contexts and the influence of international trends on local actors’ potential to critically deconstruct the nations’ founding narratives by promoting alternative, cosmopolitan and potentially agonistic perspectives.