I feel the need to push the opinion about this WHS back to “dirty, dusty and dilapidated”. Oh, and noisy too! Except for a variety of religious buildings (which were included to show the city’s multiculturality on a neighbourhood level, not because they are that scenic or significant otherwise), the OUV is all about the residential quarters (pole) and the domestic wooden architecture within these. 

Once you have left the hustle and bustle near Bhadra Fort and the Darwhaza Gate behind, the street scenery does indeed start to change from tacky shops and frantic horning rickshaws into normal living communities. It’s fun to try to navigate through the ‘pole’ to a connecting major street – sometimes you may stumble upon kids practicing cricket in the street, or even half a dozen cows resting. 

What’s “authentic” here is the urban plan. However, it’s anyone’s guess which plans the City of Ahmadabad has with the housing. Somehow you’d expect at least a certain upkeep as part of the conservation (they don’t have to be all turned into boutique hotels), but only a few structures have seen some TLC in the past decades and living conditions can’t be good (I noticed a real plague of squirrels for example). 

My visit immediately brought back fond memories of the Old City Centers of Lahore and Peshawar which I visited last year. They still house bazaars that ooze history and plenty of wooden havelis. They have great monuments you can enter such as the Hammam and the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore and the Sethi House in Peshawar. For a good visitor experience, I’d rank both of them far above Ahmadabad. 

The nomination states that Ahmadabad’s origins are pre-Mughal (an argument also used to justify Champaner), so it is about a century older than Old Lahore and Old Peshawar and two centuries older than Old Delhi. But does that matter so much? The domestic buildings we see nowadays can’t be that old.