Public space, pending
Urban Bystander
By nine in the morning, Islamabad had begun repossessing itself from the Kingdom of the Plywood Sentry Box. The first guard cabin went into the truck with surprising dignity. It had served for years outside a house, a small republic of one plastic chair, one dented flask, one register, and a prayer mat folded behind the door. Its roof was tin. Its window was cracked. Its constitutional position was unclear.
Last week, the administration removed over 250 illegal guard cabins across Islamabad, including from F-6, F-7, G-6, G-7, G-10, G-11, F-10, F-11 and the industrial area. The stated purpose was to reclaim public space and restore right-of-way. F-7 alone surrendered 113, suggesting a more advanced sentry-box civilisation.
By afternoon, the Ministry of Illusions hailed a milestone in pedestrian facilitation, which is what Islamabad calls finding the footpath under private furniture.
Constable Tufail stood beside a recovered stretch of pavement and looked moved. “Public space,” he announced, waving a motorcyclist away from it. The motorcyclist parked on it.
Thus, reform enters Islamabad. Notification, truck, motorcycle.
The chowkidars were not the joke. Many had spent years guarding other people’s anxieties through winter fog and summer heat, earning little, seeing much, and learning which house received mangoes from Multan. The joke was elsewhere. In the cabin called “temporary” after years of service, in the claim that it did not block the footpath because “no one walks here anyway,” and in private occupation performed as public safety.
Mirza Chughal Khor arrived after the action but before the understanding.
“In Islamabad,” he said, “public space is anything nobody important is using this week.”
In I-8, residents say gardens, hedges and green strips outside houses have been marked, trimmed or removed as the city moves to restore, or perhaps finally construct, footpaths. In many lanes, there had never been a footpath in the proper sense. Only municipal margins, dust strips, civic afterthoughts. So people did what people do when the state leaves a blank. They planted motia, grew grass, coaxed bougainvillea over ugliness. A dead strip became green. A municipal absence was domesticated.
Then the state returned and called it encroachment.
One old man gathered broken bricks from what had once been his motia bed. He did not argue. He placed them in a neat pile, as though tidiness might persuade the city to remember that care had lived there before concrete. The authority removed the green patch to restore the legal footpath, which existed mainly as an aspiration.
On one side of an I-8 road, flowers met the excavator. On the other, residents point to a mosque-seminary frontage where footpath, road edge, parking and protective arrangements have blurred together. There, the measuring tape remembered consultation.
Barkat Contractor understood at once. He arrived with a measuring tape, two assistants, a file, and the expression of someone discovering public interest at a profitable rate per running foot.
“For years,” Barkat said, “these people wasted this land on shade. Now it can become infrastructure.”
The measuring tape unrolled by itself.
Barkat is not against greenery. He believes it should first be removed, approved, and replanted in a rectangle surrounded by tiles.
“Empty space,” he whispered, “is a cry for pavers.”
But Islamabad’s difficulty is not only encroachment. It is selective courage. The measuring tape is brave before hedges and cautious before arrangements with history. Around markets, security points and sensitive frontages, service lanes narrow, barricades age, parking becomes routine, and public access survives by negotiation.
The pedestrian notices where the excavator arrives before breakfast and where the notice ages into heritage. He notices which footpaths become parking and which public edges become “temporary.”
The pedestrian is the city’s unpaid auditor. He audits with his ankles.
Islamabad does not lack laws. It lacks equal weather.
Later, one chowkidar sat beside the same gate on the liberated pavement, holding his thermos like a cancelled permit. He had been an encroachment, not a stakeholder.
The cabin left. The garden retreated. Barkat measured. The cone remained.
And the pedestrian, officially liberated, stepped back into traffic.–The writer can be reached at [email protected]
