Placemaking through time in Nepal: conceptualising historic urban-rural landscape of Kathmandu

The ever densified and developing cities from the rapidly urbanising Global South are still facing severe socio-cultural challenges driven by the rapid urbanisation and tourism development, including the loss of architectural heritage, cultural memory, place identity, informal ecology and economy in and around its historic urban landscape particularly. Following the call for a “peri-urban turn” in recent geographical and urban studies, this paper conceptually extends the established Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) framework to a broader Historic Urban-Rural Landscape (HURL) for the evolving and underrepresented territories of the Southern cities. It includes and interprets the local community’s placemaking practices and agency in the context of transitional rural to urban dynamics. Through ethnographic fieldwork in the historic environment of Kathmandu, Nepal and by exploring the Basantapur area’s living heritage setting for the local community’s transient, rural and ritual practices, this paper develops an urban-anthropological interpretation of tangible and, of increasing relevance in the Global South contexts, intangible cultural heritage from the local community’s perspective, narratives and agency. The paper argues for a shift in focus from approaching the urban heritage buildings, urban-rural landscape, and intangible cultural heritage separately from the HUL which traces the past, to a more transitional, evolving and layered HURL which anchors the present. It concludes the HURL’s methodological capacity to further close reading the southern place through time and the lifeworld constituted and embedded in the placemaking practice beyond the Euro-centric tradition and paradigms.