The new Islamabad has one problem. The existing one
Urban Bystander
The water can on the back seat was becoming better connected. Every new road offered another way of taking it to be filled. The household had hoped to retire it.
I think we have misunderstood the project. Someone is building a life-sized model of Islamabad. The difficulty is that Islamabad is already occupying the site.
For thirty-one months, from March 2024 to October 2026, mysterious architectural drawings have been arriving in the capital. Unroll one and excavators appear. The machinery recognises the paper. Before anyone has quite worked out what the picture means, concrete is being poured to help explain it.
The drawings, I eventually understood, are not proposals. They are corrections. Wherever Islamabad differs from the picture, the difference is recorded as the city’s mistake. A grove standing where the sheet shows nothing is not a grove. It is a discrepancy, awaiting rectification.
There is now a deadline. Heads of state are expected for next year’s SCO summit. The city must resemble its drawing before the guests arrive. The residents have been here throughout, which is not the same as being expected.
At Kashmir Chowk, the bidding documents allow the new underpass ninety days. The authority expects it in about a month. Trees take longer.
The roads multiply. Cars accept the invitation. Congestion moves to the next junction, where it is discovered to be a shortage of roads. Another drawing arrives. The machines have scarcely cooled.
On a model, this is manageable. You can lift a car between finger and thumb and put it wherever you like. Islamabad has yet to master this part. By January, the official count of paper mulberries removed to reduce allergies stood at twenty-nine thousand one hundred and fifteen. The CDA reports new planting. The figures can be replenished much faster than the shade. On the drawing, the green paint is already dry.
At F-9, the picture became harder to read.
Hyde Park was coming. Fatima Jinnah Park had not been told whether it was leaving.
The minister has guaranteed that no tree will be cut and no new concrete structures built. There will be better lighting, improved paths, thousands of additional trees, a lake and coffee shops.
This ought to settle matters. Instead, everyone is trying to imagine the same park and producing a different one. On one screen, the future is greener. On another, somebody is showing the green that is there already. Perhaps the cafés will occupy existing buildings. Perhaps the lake will be something already there, improved. Perhaps Hyde Park is simply what happens when the lights work. I would like to know which.
Meanwhile, the household can still spread a sheet beneath a tree, take tea from a flask and let a child run beyond the reach of the traffic. The child comes back for a biscuit and leaves again. This is a fairly complete afternoon. It is difficult to see where London enters it.
Elsewhere, the drawings are getting larger. A safari park on four hundred and fifty acres has been promised as the largest in Asia. Another park on the scale of F-9 is planned. The Margallas will presumably be retained to give the model a convincing background.
The original keeps intruding. A root interrupts a straight line. A pedestrian wants to cross all the lanes. A household insists on remaining where a splendid new view ought to be. The little people in architectural drawings never behave like this. You put them beside a fountain and they stay happy.
Then came the eight museums, proposed across roughly one hundred and fifty acres.
Perhaps these were where the original Islamabad was to be kept.
One could preserve the trees. Birdsong would play from a speaker. Shade would be available in the café. Another could display a greenbelt. The label would explain that the space had been left open deliberately. A third could house the fauna of the Margallas. Their habitat could be shown on a screen. This would release a considerable amount of land.
There would still be five museums to fill. The afternoon beneath the tree would fit in any of them.
We will be able to visit the city we used to live in.
There will be ample parking.
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