Looking back to move forward: what heritage conservation can teach us about sustainability

What if looking to the past is not about nostalgia, but about finding better ways to imagine the future? This question was at the heart of a recent Café Learning Session held at the Lahore Fort, where renowned architect, educator and heritage conservationist Kamil Khan Mumtaz reflected on the relationship between conservation, traditional knowledge and sustainability.

Organized by the Aga Khan Cultural Service – Pakistan (AKCS-P), the session brought together fine artists, surface conservators, architects, engineers, archivists and other creative professionals for a conversation that extended well beyond the preservation of historic buildings. At its core was a question that has become increasingly urgent: what can centuries-old ways of living teach us about the environmental challenges of the present?

For Mumtaz, conservation is not simply about preserving buildings and monuments. It is also a way of reconnecting with knowledge that has accumulated over generations.

“Conservation is sustainable and looks back at what was a better time,” he observed, pointing to the traditional techniques and design principles visible across historic sites in South Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and parts of Europe. The Mughal heritage of Lahore, including the Lahore Fort, offers particularly rich examples of the architectural traditions that have informed his thinking.

Heritage conservation is often discussed today in terms of economic development. Historic sites can generate tourism, create livelihoods and contribute to local economies, making heritage an important economic asset. But Mumtaz suggested that this economic framing can obscure another, less tangible value of conservation: its ability to connect us with the past and with the knowledge embedded in the ways earlier societies built, lived and interacted with their surroundings.

This perspective becomes especially relevant when considering sustainability. Long before the contemporary language of climate change and ecological footprints, traditional societies developed ways of managing resources according to the limits of their environments. Mumtaz referred to this as a form of “circular economy,” a relationship in which what was taken from nature was, in some form, returned to it.

In describing hunter-gatherer societies, he noted that people generally took from nature what they needed, rather than extracting resources on an ever-expanding scale.

“We practiced a natural economy for 300,000 years,” he said, contrasting this with the increasingly resource-intensive systems that developed with agriculture, industrialization and mechanized production.

The emergence of agriculture brought new forms of production and surplus. Industrialization subsequently transformed the scale at which humans could produce and consume. With machines capable of producing goods in unprecedented quantities, the relationship between consumption and the natural environment changed dramatically.

Mumtaz’s concern is that production has increasingly become an end in itself, even when it exceeds what people actually need. In today’s technological landscape—shaped by artificial intelligence, robotics and increasingly sophisticated systems of production—the question of how much we produce may be as important as how efficiently we produce it.

The environmental consequences of intensive resource use are now impossible to ignore. Climate change, rising temperatures and other ecological pressures have brought renewed attention to the limits of the planet’s resources.

Mumtaz argued that humanity has moved beyond those limits, extracting resources faster than nature can replenish them. His larger point was not simply about reducing consumption, but about reconsidering the assumptions behind the systems that drive it.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered, in his view, a striking illustration of what can happen when human activity slows. During periods of lockdown, people in many places observed changes in their immediate environments: vegetation became more noticeable, wildlife appeared in areas where it was rarely seen, and spaces normally dominated by human activity were temporarily reclaimed by other forms of life.

For Mumtaz, the lesson was not that modern life should stop, but that a sustainable strategy needs to become a guiding principle. “Taking only what you need and using resources mindfully within the limits of our planet” is, in his view, essential to creating a more sustainable future. This is where heritage conservation becomes more than an exercise in preserving the past.

Traditional buildings often embody practical responses to their local climate, materials and environment. Their design reflects generations of accumulated knowledge about ventilation, shade, orientation, materials and the efficient use of available resources.

In South Asia, historic architecture offers numerous examples of buildings designed in close relationship with their surroundings. Courtyards, shaded spaces, thick walls, natural ventilation and locally available materials were not merely aesthetic choices; they were part of ways of building that responded to climatic conditions long before the advent of modern mechanical cooling and heating.

This knowledge can provide useful inspiration as contemporary societies rethink how buildings are designed and how resources are consumed.

As Tausif Khawaja, CEO of AKCS-P, noted during the session, “The value of these approaches is evident in the traditional building practices used in historic structures that are climate-friendly and produce resilient structures.”

Heritage sites across Pakistan, he added, continue to demonstrate how traditional architectural approaches have endured over time. The conversation ultimately challenged a familiar assumption: that progress necessarily means leaving the past behind.

Modernity has brought extraordinary advances in technology, medicine, communication and production. Yet technological progress does not automatically answer the question of how resources should be used or what kind of relationship societies should have with the natural world.

Traditional knowledge offers a different perspective. It asks us to consider not only what can be produced, but what is necessary; not only what is technologically possible, but what is environmentally sustainable.

For Mumtaz, conservation provides a window through which these questions can be explored. Preserving a historic building also means preserving, where possible, the knowledge, techniques and values embedded within it. That makes conservation relevant far beyond the boundaries of heritage sites.

At a time when societies are searching for new responses to environmental pressures, looking backwards may offer an unexpected resource. The past cannot simply be replicated, nor should traditional practices be romanticized as solutions to every contemporary problem. But the accumulated knowledge of earlier generations can invite us to reconsider some of the assumptions underpinning modern life.

As one senior architect attending the session reflected, perhaps the task is to explore different perspectives and identify approaches that allow us to live well without causing harm. In that sense, conservation is not only about saving what came before us. It may also be about asking what the past can still teach us, and whether we are willing to listen.