One of the many great qualities of cities is their ability to defy the desire of the planners who attempt to orchestrate their form through design. Cities are wondrous organisms, like microbes they evolve, and the damage as well as the transformations are usually done before citizens, conservation advocates and civil society more generally even realize that change is underway—what is, in truth, most often a rear-guard action. Photography and film are perhaps the only visual mediums that truthfully capture this process. It is for this reason that the works of Thomas Lüttge and Hans Winterberg are of importance to the conservation movement, as well as a historic documentation of Hyderabad and Golconda. About the Editor: Heiko Sievers (*1952) studied psychology and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and photography at Michael Schmidt’s legendary Workshop for Photography in Berlin-Kreuzberg. After teaching at the Free University for five years, he joined the Goethe-Institut in 1987. He has headed the Goethe-Institutes in Bangalore and Lisbon, the Cultural Programme Department at the institute’s headquarters in Munich, and was the Regional Director of the Goethe-Institutes in Cairo and in New Delhi (2010-2018). He is the co-founder of CIVIC Bangalore, a citizens’ urban advocacy group. He edited Structural Adjustment. Economy, Environment, Social Concerns with Shobha Raghuram and Vinod Vyasulu (Delhi: Macmillan, 1995), Rules, Laws, Constitutions with Satish Saberwal (Delhi: Sage, 1998) and Essays on the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant with Bindu Puri (Delhi: OUP, 2007). In Berlin he published a volume of his photographs titled 1980. In Berlin (Peperoni 2016).