Amritsar’s Heritage Street: Mapping Heritage, Eclipsing Offence

Abstract

Amritsar is famous for its landscape of shrines. Recent urban redevelopments have emphasised a closer connection between the city and Sikhism. The recently inaugurated Heritage Street creates focal points in space that visually highlight this connection. Heritage Street forefronts an inclusive view of Sikhism that eclipses historical and political communal tensions and overwrites acts of offence. The dialogue between shrines and the movements of pilgrims and visitors through redeveloped spaces questions the architectured text of Heritage Street to present a parallel, if not competing, view of what heritage might mean.