At Pedestrian Space, we are developing the 2027 pilot for the Sustainable Urbanism & Planetary Health program, with a focus on Urban Heat. We are collaborating with individuals across the world for projects and insights that focus on place-based approaches to awareness-building, education, research, and knowledge exchange on issues of urban heat.
As part of this pilot development, we are recording our conversations with collaborators around the world as well as students interested in pursuing academic internships related to the URBAN HEAT 2027 pilot.
As part of that, we met with Anushey Tahir, who recently graduated with distinction in Political Science from LUMS (Lahore, Pakistan), with a thesis entitled “From Commons to Capital: State and Market Forces in the Transformation of Lahore’s Sacred Sites”. For her collaboration with our 2027 Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab, she intends to explore the relationship between heritage conservation in Lahore and urban heat.
While current heritage preservation initiatives focus more on surface-level modernisation or commercialisation of historic or sacred spaces, she hopes to ask whether Lahore’s historic architecture already embodies climate-responsive design that contemporary planning can learn from.
Drawing on her undergraduate thesis on the redevelopment of Lahore’s sacred shrines, she became increasingly interested in how changes to public spaces influence not only livelihoods and social interactions, but also people’s everyday experiences of comfort and movement. Through fieldwork around these shrines, she observed how shaded courtyards, trees, verandahs, and narrow pedestrian spaces continued to shape how people navigated these spaces during periods of intense heat or floods (as also observed these days during the monsoon season).
Rather than viewing heritage solely through the lens of conservation and modernisation, her project proposes understanding it as a form of climate infrastructure, highlighting how traditional urban design can contribute to more walkable, resilient, and thermally comfortable spaces, and what authorities can do to preserve this infrastructure that seems to be weakening every passing year due to global warming and climate change. It positions the project not as a heritage study alone, but as an exploration of how historical knowledge can inform future urban resilience to local authorities, since, alongside beautification of these sites, their ability to withstand extreme climate changes is equally important to prioritise.
View more about the Pedestrian Space ‘Sustainable Urbanism & Planetary Health’ Program URBAN HEAT pilot below.