Historic urban centers globally face a critical tension between preserving physical heritage and maintaining functional economic vitality. This functional deficit is driven by bottom-up consumer shifts away from traditional bazaars due to spatial frictions, and top-down state interventions prioritizing visual aesthetics over socio-economic utility. In Saddar Bazaar, Karachi, this conflict regarding human-heritage interactions peaked during the 2018 Anti-Encroachment Drive (AED), which removed informal commercial structures to restore the Empress Market’s colonial architecture. Consequently, this study investigates how modern, daily users navigate the dual identity of Saddar Bazaar and whether aesthetic conservation efforts affect the functional needs of its commercial base. To empirically assess how modern users navigate this duality, this study surveyed 220 recent visitors, applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering to segment user experiences. The analysis identifies three visitor typologies: Commercial-Focused, Disengaged, and Heritage-Focused. Principal results indicate a functional disparity: physical restoration transformed the historic precinct into a visual space satisfying heritage tourists but created operational constraints—such as severe traffic and inadequate parking—for daily commercial users. Furthermore, survey data show 84.3% of commercial users favor heritage conservation, demonstrating they value the built environment instrumentally as a functional anchor for socio-economic vitality. The study concludes that sustainable urban regeneration requires a deeper integration of social ecology rather than mere aesthetic preservation. To harmonize cultural preservation with economic resilience, heritage policy must transition toward inclusive functional integration—aligning with the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach—by prioritizing essential infrastructural utility alongside monument conservation.
Brohi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.