Urban Bystander
In November 2025, Islamabad approved Rs83 billion in development projects. A seven-star hotel. A convention centre. A 14-storey officers’ tower. Three days. Three approvals. Three monuments to ambition.
Meanwhile, E-12, launched in 1989 with a one-year completion promise, remains incomplete after thirty-six years.
Zafarullah, 84, has counted 1,700 fellow allottees who never got to build. He said, ‘This is now the third generation still hoping to live a peaceful life in this sector.’ Muhammad Anwar, Plot #201 in E-12/1, told researchers in 2017: “I wish to have a sigh of relief by having a shelter for myself and my family before I leave this cruel world.” He was 85. The plot remains empty. Sub-sector E-12/4 still has no tender called.
Somewhere between the drainage bylaws of 1979 and the latest feasibility study, ghost of Constantinos Doxiadis adjusts his grid. In 1960, he mapped Islamabad into 84 sectors, each a square of symmetry, purpose, and pause. The dream was order. The result, entropy!
Nearly half the city remains unbuilt. The blueprint lives on. The homes do not.
C-13 waited fifteen years between acquisition and its Built-up Property award. 2,800 bogus claims appeared. Only 328 were real. The rest? Phantom filings.
I-15 handed out 200 possession letters in 2025, twenty years late. Most original allottees can no longer afford to build. G-14 saw 1,200 federal employees die waiting. H-16 was announced, litigated, and shelved.
Babloo the Pigeon, deputed to the Grid Surveillance Wing to assist SUPARCO, circles the capital with a notepad in claw. Eighty-four sectors, multiple overlaps, zero compass bearings. “Who designed this sudoku?” he coos.
The failure has a pattern. An engine that runs in reverse, self-powered, heat-resistant, and immune to reform.
First, announce land acquisition. Then delay the BuP for 8 to 17 years. In the gap, encroachments bloom, fake claimants multiply, courts intervene, files freeze. The land becomes a hall of mirrors. In 2021, the Islamabad High Court revealed that the city had allotted 23,844 plots to its own employees, three times more than the 10,739 given to the people whose land was actually acquired. Another 7,127 plots went to “privileged groups.” The court called it “copper for gold.”
And then came the satellites.
To untangle BuP disputes and locate illegal construction, CDA turned to SUPARCO, the national space agency. In 2025, it commissioned orbital scans of sectors like C-16. The mission: document what field staff hadn’t noticed in 17 years. The billion-rupee satellites confirmed buildings clearly visible from the road.
Nosy Mynah perches on a transmission pole in C-15, where earthwork reached 40% before halting in October 2024. “It’s not a city,” she mutters. “It’s a suspended sentence.”
She tallies in her ledger; 126 illegal housing societies (67% of all that exist), 63 katchi abadis housing a third of the population, no new sector since 2005. “Master plan?” she snaps. “This is a group project where the map was submitted, but nobody showed up to build.”
Ghost zones on a ghost grid. Where the Master Plan envisioned rhythm, the file plan delivers stillness. Zafarullah, the E-12 allottee, now keeps a folder of obituaries. He’s not waiting for construction. He’s tracking who ran out of time.
It takes three days to approve Rs83 billion.
It takes three decades to finish a sector.
The map breathes.
The city holds its breath.
On quiet afternoons, Doxiadis reappears in the Ministry of Urban Irony, trying to remeasure H-16 with a ruler that no longer exists. The office is closed. The map has been laminated.
The city waits. Not for answers, but for movement.In Islamabad, development is immortal. Only its witnesses perish, slowly, silently, with stamped receipts.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
