Amritsar is a walled city with a modern city around it, and the two work differently. The walled city is dense, mixed use, organised in katras and trade bazaars, and largely pedestrian. The outside is a normal Indian city of colonies and ring roads.
Its economy is pilgrimage, trade, textiles, food processing and a border it can no longer trade across.
It was one of the largest cities in northern India before 1947 and lost its hinterland, its trade routes and a large part of its population in one year, and gained a refugee population of a different composition.
The heritage plaza built around the Golden Temple in the 2010s cleared a large area of the walled city's fabric to create an approach, which improved access and removed buildings, and is defended and attacked with equal energy.
Amritsar's air quality, water supply and solid waste position are poor and the visitor economy does not fund the city's services in any direct way.
A city receiving tens of millions of visitors a year has the municipal finances of a district town.
The old city is a set of katras inside a wall with twelve gates, of which one, the Hall Gate, survives in a rebuilt form.
The wall had twelve gates and a ditch outside it. The British took it down after 1849 and put a circular road on the line of it, which still runs. The gates were rebuilt later as ornamental arches, which is why the names survive on a road with no wall attached to them.
The city's trade was shawls, carpets, textiles and the transit business through Lahore. What it has now is the visitors and a manufacturing sector that never recovered from the border.