Heritage Walk Karachi will be participating in the workshop “Walking Heritage into Future Cities” organized by University of Exeter and Heritage Walk Calcutta in Exeter, UK.

Walking Heritage into Future Cities (henceforth Walking Heritage) is a new project addressing some of the challenges that threaten the unique and complex built and social heritage such as economic development, rapid urbanization and communal tensions in four South Asian cities. The project is a collaboration between the University of Exeter’s Archaeology department and Business School and Heritage Walk Calcutta (HWC), an innovative social enterprise combining academic research excellence with ethical community development through heritage tourism, especially walking tours.

The aim of Walking Heritage is not to preserve through policy and legislation, but to protect and nurture through awareness, knowledge-sharing, income-generation, and community engagement following the model developed by HWC and HWK. A workshop at Exeter will provide the opportunity for knowledge exchange and to compare and contrast these two models of operation to come up with a set of best practices for ethical, research-based, community-oriented urban heritage tourism projects in South Asia. The model thus developed will then be tested through an incubation program at Kolkata. Jaffna, Sri Lanka and Hyderabad, India have been selected to test this incubation program for their rich histories, post-colonial conflicts about heritage and identity, and current exponential growth of urbanization.

The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) is an UK Government fund to support cutting-edge research that addresses the challenges faced by developing countries. The Walking Heritage into Future Cities project is a GCRF-funded interdisciplinary collaboration between University of Exeter’s Department of Archaeology and Business School and Heritage Walk Calcutta (HWC), an academic-led, community-focused heritage tourism company in Kolkata, India.