Sites and landscapes of cultural and historical significance are increasingly at risk in urban India. In emerging cities that are now experiencing an industrial and housing boom, this risk is most significantly manifested through issues of heritage management. This study highlights the challenges of managing heritage in the emerging city of Lucknow. Historically and today, heritage sites and landscapes in the city have faced neglect, or worse, demolition, in the absence of local mechanisms that can identify, designate, preserve and protect them. These threats have been exacerbated by recent economically and politically motivated development particular to the city. Drawing on archival sources, interviews and survey data, this work illustrates how managing heritage in Lucknow involves challenges of administration, ownership, enforcement and jurisdiction. The study focuses on the three historic precincts of Husainabad, Kaiserbagh and Hazratganj to argue that relationship dynamics between stakeholders are particular to every city and therefore necessitate individualized and locally-specific heritage management mechanisms. Each case study, examined through a historical and a contemporary lens, highlights its particular challenges, nuanced by specific administrative, legislative and cognitive dynamics that are unique to the city of Lucknow. Husainabad, Kaiserbagh and Hazratganj each have different levels of designation and legislation, and the kinds of stakeholders and administrators involved. Consequently, their differences highlight how public and private stakeholders balance economics and commerce with heritage, religion with tourism, private ownership with public preservation and local administration, legislation with enforcement, and historic built fabric with contemporary pressures of development in very different ways. Although the various kinds of challenges are historically rooted, they have been exacerbated over time by sweeping legislation at the federal and state levels. This indicates a change is needed, with a new urban heritage management system to respond to each city's unique administrative, cultural and cognitive dynamics to better integrate local preservation, planning, legislative and administrative efforts. The system will work with, and enhance the existing public and private resources to help Indian cities manage their built heritage more efficiently. The findings in Lucknow are relevant for local officials, preservationists and heritage advocates in other Indian cities where built heritage continues to be at risk. The urban heritage management system (UHMS) proposed in this research can shape the future of historic landscapes in Indian cities by addressing the root causes of mismanagement that fail to preserve and protect the historic urban landscape, and help emerging cities from further loss of their historic built environment.