Through a relational and comparative case study approach with field sites in northern India and Nepal, HaP explores how people, institutions, and collectives participate in the formation, preservation, decay, and/or erasure of heritage. The project contributes to a critical reflection of heritage production beyond developmentalism and preservation. It is situated in the fields of critical heritage studies, new area studies, and transcultural urbanization studies, and the theoretical implications of its empirical work seeks to build a new model of enabling heritage through place-making. HaP’s research is united, supported, and structured through its development of four theoretical pillars: decolonization, erasure, commoning, and bureaucracy. Each subproject and researcher engages with multiple of these theoretical strands, and each of the four years of the project focuses on the theoretical development of one of them. Essential to each strand is their ability to function both separately and simultaneously as tools of analysis: heritage placemaking can be at once understood as a project of decolonization, a condition for commoning, entangled with bureaucracy, and a potential politics of erasure.