--- title: "Islamabad: The City Pakistan Built for its Social Elite | Megaprojects" description: "In the long arc of history, modern Pakistan is very much a new nation, and for a country whose name was coined as recently as January 1933, it's only fitting that its capital city is even newer. From the moment it was commissioned in 1959, Pakistan's capital city of Islamabad was as bold an endeavor as the nation of Pakistan itself, an effort to create a booming metropolis where none had existed before. One of only a few truly successful planned cities, Islamabad now boasts a metro-area population of more than two million, and in a country that still struggles with things like literacy, infant mortality, and infrastructure, Islamabad is in many ways a shining, cosmopolitan example of what Pakistan hopes to be.\n\nBut at the same time, the city's stark contrast against the rest of Pakistan is not by accident. From a building process fraught with difficulties and shortsighted design choices, to a finished product that has created a Gilded Age for Pakistan's elite and pushed its urban poor into slums, the creation of Islamabad is as much a cautionary tale, as it is a legitimate achievement of planned-city architecture.\n\n## Conception and Design\n\nWhen Pakistan gained its independence in 1947, the government established its seat of power in the port city of Karachi, which was, at that time, midway through a process of rapid expansion. The Partition of India, also in 1947, had split the formerly unified British Raj into a predominantly Hindu state, India, and the predominantly Muslim state of Pakistan, but that partition was brutally painful for both sides. Suffice to say that the partition was accompanied by tremendous loss of life in both India and Pakistan, and forced millions upon millions of people to migrate across the region.\n\nMany of those migrants ended up in Karachi, and as the city's population swelled faster than urban planners could handle, it began to look less and less like a proper capital city, and more like what it actually was at the time: a hasty, provisional solution that had little hope of ever being suitable for the job. Karachi spent its time as capital overwhelmed with refugees, many of whom lived in poverty and squalor, and the city's location on the Indian Ocean brought up legitimate concerns from the Pakistani government around whether it could be defended in times of war. Although the city experienced an economic surge in the 1960s, followed by a construction boom in the 1970s, these advances were only relative to what Karachi had been when it was in the height of crisis, and the beleaguered city had a very long way to go before it would be anywhere near capable of holding its own as a proper capital.\n\nIt was in the face of these difficulties that in 1958, Pakistan formed a commission to identify a site for a permanent capital city. At the time, there were no cities in the country that would have been anywhere near capable of handling the people or industry that a capital city brings, and none that could provide suitable infrastructure to support new and often wealthy communities. Whatever capital Pakistan did get, would have to be built from the ground up.\n\nBefore long, Pakistani authorities settled on an area just outside the city of Rawalpindi, where local road networks were well-developed enough to get building materials to the new capital, and laborers could be housed without having to build the required facilities from the ground up. Rawalpindi was located in the Himalayan foothills, close to an area that was, at that time, expected to host a so-called Trans-Asian Highway, which has since evolved into the Asian Highway Network. And finally, it addressed the strategic concerns of the Pakistani military, where the altitude, terrain, and absence of sea made the location far more defensible if war with India or another regional power ever broke out. The new capital city would be built while leaning on the urban and natural assets of Rawalpindi, and the capital—named Islamabad, or City of Islam—would become an indispensable part of the vision for Pakistan's future.\n\nThe early plan for Islamabad relied on the concept of a *dynamopolis*—that is, a dynamic metropolis. As the city's urban planner, a Greek architect named C. A. Doxiadis, saw it, Islamabad would form the centerpiece to a broader metropolitan area, which would fuse the city with not just Rawalpindi, but areas that would be designated as a national park. Doxiadis was a believer in looking at cities as an interaction between physical structures, like roads and buildings, and the humans that lived and worked inside them, as well as a third factor, the broader society that those people lived in, and a fourth, the natural environment provided by the landscape. In a practical sense, that meant that the first settlements at Islamabad would be placed at a T-junction with Rawalpindi and the local national parks, with a long highway stretching into the distance where Islamabad would eventually be built—but it wouldn't be built, until there were enough people to fill a new development, and then another, and then another. In hindsight, this staggered-building approach has been one of Islamabad's major advantages, with new developments moving, as needed, in a single direction northeastward instead of sprawling out at random.\n\nThe city was planned, block by block, in a rigid grid-iron pattern, with certain zones allotted for residential, educational, commercial, and governmental functions. From the start of development, this started to raise eyebrows—after all, such tightly defined zones tend to work well in theory, and fail to serve their actual residents in practice. But the zones began to seem even more sketchy when it was revealed that they would be explicitly stratified on the basis of income, with communities that were directly intended, even before they were built, to keep people of similar wealth together. Not only that, but those communities would all be organized around central shopping districts, which make good sense to keep traffic out of neighborhoods, but had the potential to make auto travel in those shopping districts—which, by the way, is exactly what they were designed for—into a roiling mess of traffic.\n\nAnd the further one looked into Islamabad's Master Plan, the more it seemed as if C. A. Doxiadis and company had a crystal-clear vision for what they expected Islamabad to be, and very little in the way of backup plans if literally anything less than that ideal vision ended up becoming the reality. By example, the city was built on a strict hierarchy of road widths: 1,200-foot-wide roads fed outward to 600-foot-wide roads, and then to 300-foot-wide roads, with no real consideration to what might happen if the city didn't motorize enough to need those massive roads, or if that arrangement of roads could become impractical once the city started to grow and change with its population. The city plan also ignored some elements of the natural landscape, using flat roads rather than curved ones despite the likelihood of heavy rainfall and erosion, and prescribing that large parts of the landscape be leveled and flattened, instead of just building with the rise and fall of the land.\n\nIn 1960, Pakistan's Capital Development Authority was established to oversee the construction process, with nearly total discretion in the decisions required to actually build the city. The CDA was made up almost entirely of foreign architects and planners; only three major planners on the project were Pakistani, although the project was under direction from Pakistan's own political appointees. Perhaps this, too, should have been a warning sign, that Pakistan lacked the personnel to truly bring Islamabad in line with its architectural vision. But nonetheless, construction got underway that same year, just a little over a decade after Pakistan had become a nation at all.\n\n## Building Islamabad\n\nWhen it came time to break ground in Islamabad, Pakistan's labor landscape was in dire need of jobs, so rather than rely on foreign contractors and heavy machinery to do the hard work of building a capital, the city was instead built using vast numbers of laborers, armed with relatively simple tools. In fact, large-scale construction machinery was banned from the process, in an effort to get as many builders out to Islamabad as possible, and although this significantly slowed the city's pace of construction, it did provide a valuable lifeline to many Pakistani families who might otherwise have gone without work.\n\nBut almost as soon as construction began, it became clear that the architects' master plan would be very difficult to implement in practice. The board in charge of Islamabad's development had no say over the city of Rawalpindi, where a separate mess of bureaucratic urban planning boards had their own discretion over what development happened, and when. As a result, Rawalpindi, which had been so integral for the plan for Islamabad, was removed from the development process almost immediately. Instead, Rawalpindi moved into a support role for the project, housing workers and accommodating the first bits of government that moved in. Unfortunately, Rawalpindi received very few resources compared to Islamabad, so even if the city's bureaucrats did want to modernize alongside Islamabad, they had no real means with which to do so.\n\nAs a result, Islamabad's master plan fractured quickly, although it wouldn't actually be abandoned until the late 1970s. Instead, the developers went ahead with the plan strictly for Islamabad proper. The city was envisioned as a low-lying, spread-out metropolis, taking full advantage of the available space instead of building upward, and rather than erecting skyscrapers or elaborate monuments, most work in the residential areas consisted of leveling lots, building single-story homes, and trying to make those homes into neighborhoods. Similarly, its commercial zones were filled with the sort of relatively standard office buildings and shopping malls that builders around the world, and in Pakistan, were more than able to handle by that time.\n\nThe real architectural challenge was in the city's political and administrative zones. Pakistan's Presidential Palace, by example, was built in a cosmopolitan step-pyramid style, with elaborate nearby fountains, a zoo, and stables for a hundred horses on premises. The Parliament House took all of eleven years to build across almost 600,000 square feet, and the Secretariat building, the cabinet's headquarters, is a sprawling, elaborate complex that was pieced together by a long list of architects, each responsible for individual sub-sections of the building. Most impressive of all is the Faisal Mosque, the national mosque of Pakistan and the fifth-largest in the entire world, comprising an eight-sided shell meant to resemble a Bedouin tent, and four minarets, each over 250 feet tall. Like the rest of the city, these detailed, massive structures were built without heavy machinery, by the tools and labor of construction workers from all across Pakistan.\n\nDuring the construction process, international onlookers had reason to be skeptical on whether or not Islamabad would ever be a success. After all, Pakistan at the time was not a wealthy place, and the recent example of Brasilia, a capital city that Brazil had also made from the ground-up just a few years earlier, showed just how much of a drain a planned capital could be on a country's limited resources. But in Pakistan, specifically, there was reason to grit one's teeth and advocate pushing forward with the project anyway; the alternative was trying to get Karachi into shape to be a capital, and that simply wasn't going to happen.\n\nConstruction pressed on through the mid-1960s, until finally, the city's essential works were declared complete in 1966. From there, Islamabad continued to develop its residential and commercial areas, as more and more elements of government made themselves comfortable in Pakistan's new seat of power. In 1981, Islamabad was designated a special territory independent of the surrounding Punjab province, and although it was kept administratively distinct from nearby Rawalpindi, the two cities spent decades intermingling and becoming more reliant upon each other, until today's Islamabad, very much including Rawalpindi, could finally take shape.\n\n## The City of Today\n\nThe modern city of Islamabad is among the most modern, cosmopolitan cities in all of South Asia, and has quickly grown into a governmental and diplomatic powerhouse not just in Pakistan, but on the world stage. As Pakistan has continued to grow in its economic power, Islamabad has been a direct beneficiary, and business centers like the Centaurus Complex and the Blue Area district have risen up out of the ground as a result. The city is Pakistan's largest educational hub, boasting several universities, and its population of expatriates has only grown with time. Rather than a concrete jungle like New York or Hong Kong, Islamabad has remained lush and green, surrounded by incredible, well-preserved forests and national parks, all coming together to make Islamabad one of the most visually stunning capital cities in the world.\n\nBut with all the intense, and often, prescriptive work that went into planning out the lay of the city, it should perhaps be unsurprising that in practice, Islamabad is something of a stale place to be in. Its layout, designed on a utopian ideal of what a city of the future might be, ends up somewhat cold and sterile in many places. Go into Islamabad with a checklist of Things That A City Should Have, and you'll probably check off the entire list, but the variety, the community, and the powerful energy of a thriving city, are all missing at its center. And word gets around; while there's not an explicit shortage of people willing to live in Islamabad, it's not exactly a place that make young, aspiring Pakistanis light up when they speak of the possibility of \"making it\"—at least, unless they want a career in politics. We should be clear, people absolutely do move to Islamabad chasing opportunity, but these decisions are more due to the simple fact that Islamabad is one of the few major urban centers that Pakistan can offer at all.\n\nIslamabad's combination of quick economic growth, and the fact that a majority of its residential zones were built with middle-class or wealthy individuals in mind, have led to perhaps Islamabad's worst problem in the modern day: a housing crisis, in which many of the laborers, service workers, and domestic personnel who are responsible for making Islamabad run smoothly, cannot afford housing in the same city where they work. And without readily available housing options, those people have had to create their own places to live, in rapidly expanding slums and shanty towns that now comprise about ten percent of the city's land area. Here, working Pakistanis mix with refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere, and religious minorities are significantly over-represented compared to their status elsewhere in Pakistani society. Clean water is hard to come by, sanitation services are woefully underequipped to handle the number of people living there, and with Pakistan's very low daily wages for unskilled workers, it's difficult for most slum residents to ever work their way out toward something better.\n\nIn many ways, Islamabad has thus divided into two cities, one in which political and business elites are welcome to indulge in the pleasures of a modern metropolis, and one in which the people responsible for that metropolis struggle to keep up. Islamabad has expanded outward in recent years, leapfrogging into new settlements and developments for the wealthy, and each time, a new neighborhood ends up needing a new slum nearby, filling in its own part of the urban sprawl. The city's population has steadily grown, to the point that its metro area boasts some two million residents today, over half of whom have arrived in the 21st century. But for every one person who comes to Islamabad to enjoy the high life, so does another, who's likely to spend years or even decades scraping by. In many ways, this reflects life across Pakistan, where just twenty percent of the national population commands nearly half of its income. But like in many nations, Pakistan's capital city is a caricature of the problems faced elsewhere; they're bigger in Islamabad, and harder to ignore.\n\nThis was a problem that the city's architect, C. A. Doxiadis, had tried to express before Islamabad was even built. In his own words, \"A capital city exercises great influence on the entire country. Thus its inhabitants should not belong only to one social group (economic, political, ethnic, etc.), but should belong to as many groups as possible.\" Certainly, Doxiadis and the team behind Islamabad's master plan had not intended to fill their city with shanty towns; even if lower-class areas were explicitly segregated in the initial plan, they were at least built into the plan in the first place. But as Islamabad was built, the city's decision to abandon its master plan has led to the sort of haphazard urban sprawl where these avoidable problems only grow larger each year.\n\nIn the face of this major issue, Islamabad has attempted to make itself better, but urban economic development has been badly underpowered in recent years, with not enough money traveling into the right areas to make a truly livable city. As the city has covered more and more territory, the surrounding forest has been lucky enough to survive, but rising temperatures and dryness in the region have prompted early signs of a pending ecological collapse, at the same time that Islamabad's population has continued to swell. And even today, the consequences of Islamabad's administrative separation from its neighbor Rawalpindi have led to haphazard expansion and even more wealth inequality; as much as both cities have intertwined, their decades-long history apart has led to Rawalpindi shouldering the burden of Islamabad's wealth inequality.\n\nWhen it comes to Islamabad's future, the unfortunate reality is that the city, and its people, can expect more of the same. The city's public works and infrastructure are crumbling from a lack of maintenance, and the few efforts the city has made to mitigate those problems, simply aren't enough. The city only just got a bus system in 2015, with no rail or other public, intra-city transit to speak of except for a mess of taxicabs and ride-shares. Because the city was never built to be population-dense, its developments continue to consume more and more land, increasing the city's surface area in a sprawl of single-family homes, but not fostering any of the dedicated centers that a city needs to thrive. In fact, the city has struggled to even regulate its own developments, with many of them being built illegally or without public approval, and Islamabad's near-complete dependency on cars has begun to make the city's major roads impassable.\n\nAll things considered, we still must give credit to Islamabad for doing that one great, difficult thing that so many planned cities fail to do; put simply, it exists. People live there, it serves an important function, and it has forever avoided the list of misguided planned-city attempts that were dead on arrival. But as impressive as a feat Pakistan accomplished by building Islamabad, it's been chronically unable to follow through on delivering the city that Islamabad might have been. On its current course, Islamabad is headed down the long, painful road to urban decay, and unless something radical changes, that's precisely where the city will eventually end up.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, was commissioned in 1959 and is one of the few successful planned cities.\n- The city's design, led by C. A. Doxiadis, aimed for a dynamic metropolis but faced implementation challenges.\n- Islamabad's rigid grid-iron pattern and income-stratified zones have led to a stark contrast between elite and poor areas.\n- The city's housing crisis has resulted in rapidly expanding slums, where many workers cannot afford to live.\n- Despite its modern amenities, Islamabad struggles with urban decay and infrastructure maintenance issues.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### When was Islamabad commissioned as Pakistan's capital?\n\nIslamabad was commissioned in 1959.\n\n### What was the initial population plan for Islamabad?\n\nThe city was planned to be built in stages, with new developments moving northeastward as needed, rather than sprawling out at random.\n\n### What was the concept behind the design of Islamabad?\n\nThe concept was a dynamopolis, a dynamic metropolis that would form the centerpiece of a broader metropolitan area, integrating with Rawalpindi and local national parks.\n\n### Who was the urban planner for Islamabad?\n\nThe urban planner for Islamabad was a Greek architect named C. A. Doxiadis.\n\n### What were some of the initial challenges faced during the construction of Islamabad?\n\nThe board in charge of Islamabad’s development had no say over Rawalpindi, leading to bureaucratic issues. Additionally, the city was built using vast numbers of laborers with simple tools, significantly slowing the construction pace.\n\n### What is the current population of Islamabad's metro area?\n\nThe metro-area population of Islamabad is more than two million.\n\n### What are some of the major architectural landmarks in Islamabad?\n\nMajor landmarks include the Presidential Palace, the Parliament House, the Secretariat building, and the Faisal Mosque, which is the fifth-largest mosque in the world.\n\n### What is one of the major issues facing Islamabad today?\n\nOne of the major issues is a housing crisis, where many laborers and service workers cannot afford housing in the city, leading to the growth of slums and shanty towns.\n\n### How has Islamabad's administrative separation from Rawalpindi affected the cities?\n\nThe separation has led to haphazard expansion and increased wealth inequality, with Rawalpindi shouldering the burden of Islamabad’s wealth disparity.\n\n### What is the current state of public transportation in Islamabad?\n\nIslamabad only recently got a bus system in 2015, with no rail or other public, intra-city transit except for taxicabs and ride-shares.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original MegaProjects video: Islamabad: The City Pakistan Built for its Social Elite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gm_maxN5Ig)\n- [https://www.britannica.com/place/Islamabad](https://www.britannica.com/place/Islamabad)\n- [https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/13/archives/the-talk-of-karachi-pakistans-metropolis-karachis-loyal-inhabitants.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/13/archives/the-talk-of-karachi-pakistans-metropolis-karachis-loyal-inhabitants.html)\n- [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/aug/17/buildingislamabad](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/aug/17/buildingislamabad)\n- [https://senate.gov.pk/en/parliament.php?id=-1&catid=4&subcatid=267&cattitle=Parliament%20House](https://senate.gov.pk/en/parliament.php?id=-1&catid=4&subcatid=267&cattitle=Parliament%20House)\n- [https://www.archnet.org/sites/263](https://www.archnet.org/sites/263)\n- [https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-slums-of-islamabad](https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-slums-of-islamabad)\n- [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/13/elite-privilege-consumes-17-4bn-of-pakistans-economy-undp](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/13/elite-privilege-consumes-17-4bn-of-pakistans-economy-undp)\n- [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-020-10172-w#Sec20](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-020-10172-w#Sec20)\n- [https://www.isocarp.net/data/case_studies/720.pdf](https://www.isocarp.net/data/case_studies/720.pdf)\n- [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43619514.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A1bce76f857cda8a10d709ef221a59d9f&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43619514.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A1bce76f857cda8a10d709ef221a59d9f&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1)\n- [https://pide.org.pk/research/the-islamabad-master-plan/](https://pide.org.pk/research/the-islamabad-master-plan/)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Karachi_from_above.jpg) by Bilalhassan88 / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage" url: https://megaprojects.pub/article/islamabad-city-pakistan-built-social-elite.md canonical: https://megaprojects.pub/article/islamabad-city-pakistan-built-social-elite datePublished: 2026-06-16 dateModified: 2026-06-16 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://megaprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: MegaProjects image: "https://media.megaprojects.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,height=338,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/9gm_maxN5Ig/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 31d09326f0ebd933a70796365b4b449df5e7646fd488adfc8789fb889d63b055 tokens: 6114 summaryUrl: https://megaprojects.pub/article/islamabad-city-pakistan-built-social-elite.md.summary.md --- In the long arc of history, modern Pakistan is very much a new nation, and for a country whose name was coined as recently as January 1933, it's only fitting that its capital city is even newer. From the moment it was commissioned in 1959, Pakistan's capital city of Islamabad was as bold an endeavor as the nation of Pakistan itself, an effort to create a booming metropolis where none had existed before. One of only a few truly successful planned cities, Islamabad now boasts a metro-area population of more than two million, and in a country that still struggles with things like literacy, infant mortality, and infrastructure, Islamabad is in many ways a shining, cosmopolitan example of what Pakistan hopes to be. But at the same time, the city's stark contrast against the rest of Pakistan is not by accident. From a building process fraught with difficulties and shortsighted design choices, to a finished product that has created a Gilded Age for Pakistan's elite and pushed its urban poor into slums, the creation of Islamabad is as much a cautionary tale, as it is a legitimate achievement of planned-city architecture. ## Conception and Design When Pakistan gained its independence in 1947, the government established its seat of power in the port city of Karachi, which was, at that time, midway through a process of rapid expansion. The Partition of India, also in 1947, had split the formerly unified British Raj into a predominantly Hindu state, India, and the predominantly Muslim state of Pakistan, but that partition was brutally painful for both sides. Suffice to say that the partition was accompanied by tremendous loss of life in both India and Pakistan, and forced millions upon millions of people to migrate across the region. Many of those migrants ended up in Karachi, and as the city's population swelled faster than urban planners could handle, it began to look less and less like a proper capital city, and more like what it actually was at the time: a hasty, provisional solution that had little hope of ever being suitable for the job. Karachi spent its time as capital overwhelmed with refugees, many of whom lived in poverty and squalor, and the city's location on the Indian Ocean brought up legitimate concerns from the Pakistani government around whether it could be defended in times of war. Although the city experienced an economic surge in the 1960s, followed by a construction boom in the 1970s, these advances were only relative to what Karachi had been when it was in the height of crisis, and the beleaguered city had a very long way to go before it would be anywhere near capable of holding its own as a proper capital. It was in the face of these difficulties that in 1958, Pakistan formed a commission to identify a site for a permanent capital city. At the time, there were no cities in the country that would have been anywhere near capable of handling the people or industry that a capital city brings, and none that could provide suitable infrastructure to support new and often wealthy communities. Whatever capital Pakistan did get, would have to be built from the ground up. Before long, Pakistani authorities settled on an area just outside the city of Rawalpindi, where local road networks were well-developed enough to get building materials to the new capital, and laborers could be housed without having to build the required facilities from the ground up. Rawalpindi was located in the Himalayan foothills, close to an area that was, at that time, expected to host a so-called Trans-Asian Highway, which has since evolved into the Asian Highway Network. And finally, it addressed the strategic concerns of the Pakistani military, where the altitude, terrain, and absence of sea made the location far more defensible if war with India or another regional power ever broke out. The new capital city would be built while leaning on the urban and natural assets of Rawalpindi, and the capital—named Islamabad, or City of Islam—would become an indispensable part of the vision for Pakistan's future. The early plan for Islamabad relied on the concept of a *dynamopolis*—that is, a dynamic metropolis. As the city's urban planner, a Greek architect named C. A. Doxiadis, saw it, Islamabad would form the centerpiece to a broader metropolitan area, which would fuse the city with not just Rawalpindi, but areas that would be designated as a national park. Doxiadis was a believer in looking at cities as an interaction between physical structures, like roads and buildings, and the humans that lived and worked inside them, as well as a third factor, the broader society that those people lived in, and a fourth, the natural environment provided by the landscape. In a practical sense, that meant that the first settlements at Islamabad would be placed at a T-junction with Rawalpindi and the local national parks, with a long highway stretching into the distance where Islamabad would eventually be built—but it wouldn't be built, until there were enough people to fill a new development, and then another, and then another. In hindsight, this staggered-building approach has been one of Islamabad's major advantages, with new developments moving, as needed, in a single direction northeastward instead of sprawling out at random. The city was planned, block by block, in a rigid grid-iron pattern, with certain zones allotted for residential, educational, commercial, and governmental functions. From the start of development, this started to raise eyebrows—after all, such tightly defined zones tend to work well in theory, and fail to serve their actual residents in practice. But the zones began to seem even more sketchy when it was revealed that they would be explicitly stratified on the basis of income, with communities that were directly intended, even before they were built, to keep people of similar wealth together. Not only that, but those communities would all be organized around central shopping districts, which make good sense to keep traffic out of neighborhoods, but had the potential to make auto travel in those shopping districts—which, by the way, is exactly what they were designed for—into a roiling mess of traffic. And the further one looked into Islamabad's Master Plan, the more it seemed as if C. A. Doxiadis and company had a crystal-clear vision for what they expected Islamabad to be, and very little in the way of backup plans if literally anything less than that ideal vision ended up becoming the reality. By example, the city was built on a strict hierarchy of road widths: 1,200-foot-wide roads fed outward to 600-foot-wide roads, and then to 300-foot-wide roads, with no real consideration to what might happen if the city didn't motorize enough to need those massive roads, or if that arrangement of roads could become impractical once the city started to grow and change with its population. The city plan also ignored some elements of the natural landscape, using flat roads rather than curved ones despite the likelihood of heavy rainfall and erosion, and prescribing that large parts of the landscape be leveled and flattened, instead of just building with the rise and fall of the land. In 1960, Pakistan's Capital Development Authority was established to oversee the construction process, with nearly total discretion in the decisions required to actually build the city. The CDA was made up almost entirely of foreign architects and planners; only three major planners on the project were Pakistani, although the project was under direction from Pakistan's own political appointees. Perhaps this, too, should have been a warning sign, that Pakistan lacked the personnel to truly bring Islamabad in line with its architectural vision. But nonetheless, construction got underway that same year, just a little over a decade after Pakistan had become a nation at all. ## Building Islamabad When it came time to break ground in Islamabad, Pakistan's labor landscape was in dire need of jobs, so rather than rely on foreign contractors and heavy machinery to do the hard work of building a capital, the city was instead built using vast numbers of laborers, armed with relatively simple tools. In fact, large-scale construction machinery was banned from the process, in an effort to get as many builders out to Islamabad as possible, and although this significantly slowed the city's pace of construction, it did provide a valuable lifeline to many Pakistani families who might otherwise have gone without work. But almost as soon as construction began, it became clear that the architects' master plan would be very difficult to implement in practice. The board in charge of Islamabad's development had no say over the city of Rawalpindi, where a separate mess of bureaucratic urban planning boards had their own discretion over what development happened, and when. As a result, Rawalpindi, which had been so integral for the plan for Islamabad, was removed from the development process almost immediately. Instead, Rawalpindi moved into a support role for the project, housing workers and accommodating the first bits of government that moved in. Unfortunately, Rawalpindi received very few resources compared to Islamabad, so even if the city's bureaucrats did want to modernize alongside Islamabad, they had no real means with which to do so. As a result, Islamabad's master plan fractured quickly, although it wouldn't actually be abandoned until the late 1970s. Instead, the developers went ahead with the plan strictly for Islamabad proper. The city was envisioned as a low-lying, spread-out metropolis, taking full advantage of the available space instead of building upward, and rather than erecting skyscrapers or elaborate monuments, most work in the residential areas consisted of leveling lots, building single-story homes, and trying to make those homes into neighborhoods. Similarly, its commercial zones were filled with the sort of relatively standard office buildings and shopping malls that builders around the world, and in Pakistan, were more than able to handle by that time. The real architectural challenge was in the city's political and administrative zones. Pakistan's Presidential Palace, by example, was built in a cosmopolitan step-pyramid style, with elaborate nearby fountains, a zoo, and stables for a hundred horses on premises. The Parliament House took all of eleven years to build across almost 600,000 square feet, and the Secretariat building, the cabinet's headquarters, is a sprawling, elaborate complex that was pieced together by a long list of architects, each responsible for individual sub-sections of the building. Most impressive of all is the Faisal Mosque, the national mosque of Pakistan and the fifth-largest in the entire world, comprising an eight-sided shell meant to resemble a Bedouin tent, and four minarets, each over 250 feet tall. Like the rest of the city, these detailed, massive structures were built without heavy machinery, by the tools and labor of construction workers from all across Pakistan. During the construction process, international onlookers had reason to be skeptical on whether or not Islamabad would ever be a success. After all, Pakistan at the time was not a wealthy place, and the recent example of Brasilia, a capital city that Brazil had also made from the ground-up just a few years earlier, showed just how much of a drain a planned capital could be on a country's limited resources. But in Pakistan, specifically, there was reason to grit one's teeth and advocate pushing forward with the project anyway; the alternative was trying to get Karachi into shape to be a capital, and that simply wasn't going to happen. Construction pressed on through the mid-1960s, until finally, the city's essential works were declared complete in 1966. From there, Islamabad continued to develop its residential and commercial areas, as more and more elements of government made themselves comfortable in Pakistan's new seat of power. In 1981, Islamabad was designated a special territory independent of the surrounding Punjab province, and although it was kept administratively distinct from nearby Rawalpindi, the two cities spent decades intermingling and becoming more reliant upon each other, until today's Islamabad, very much including Rawalpindi, could finally take shape. ## The City of Today The modern city of Islamabad is among the most modern, cosmopolitan cities in all of South Asia, and has quickly grown into a governmental and diplomatic powerhouse not just in Pakistan, but on the world stage. As Pakistan has continued to grow in its economic power, Islamabad has been a direct beneficiary, and business centers like the Centaurus Complex and the Blue Area district have risen up out of the ground as a result. The city is Pakistan's largest educational hub, boasting several universities, and its population of expatriates has only grown with time. Rather than a concrete jungle like New York or Hong Kong, Islamabad has remained lush and green, surrounded by incredible, well-preserved forests and national parks, all coming together to make Islamabad one of the most visually stunning capital cities in the world. But with all the intense, and often, prescriptive work that went into planning out the lay of the city, it should perhaps be unsurprising that in practice, Islamabad is something of a stale place to be in. Its layout, designed on a utopian ideal of what a city of the future might be, ends up somewhat cold and sterile in many places. Go into Islamabad with a checklist of Things That A City Should Have, and you'll probably check off the entire list, but the variety, the community, and the powerful energy of a thriving city, are all missing at its center. And word gets around; while there's not an explicit shortage of people willing to live in Islamabad, it's not exactly a place that make young, aspiring Pakistanis light up when they speak of the possibility of "making it"—at least, unless they want a career in politics. We should be clear, people absolutely do move to Islamabad chasing opportunity, but these decisions are more due to the simple fact that Islamabad is one of the few major urban centers that Pakistan can offer at all. Islamabad's combination of quick economic growth, and the fact that a majority of its residential zones were built with middle-class or wealthy individuals in mind, have led to perhaps Islamabad's worst problem in the modern day: a housing crisis, in which many of the laborers, service workers, and domestic personnel who are responsible for making Islamabad run smoothly, cannot afford housing in the same city where they work. And without readily available housing options, those people have had to create their own places to live, in rapidly expanding slums and shanty towns that now comprise about ten percent of the city's land area. Here, working Pakistanis mix with refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere, and religious minorities are significantly over-represented compared to their status elsewhere in Pakistani society. Clean water is hard to come by, sanitation services are woefully underequipped to handle the number of people living there, and with Pakistan's very low daily wages for unskilled workers, it's difficult for most slum residents to ever work their way out toward something better. In many ways, Islamabad has thus divided into two cities, one in which political and business elites are welcome to indulge in the pleasures of a modern metropolis, and one in which the people responsible for that metropolis struggle to keep up. Islamabad has expanded outward in recent years, leapfrogging into new settlements and developments for the wealthy, and each time, a new neighborhood ends up needing a new slum nearby, filling in its own part of the urban sprawl. The city's population has steadily grown, to the point that its metro area boasts some two million residents today, over half of whom have arrived in the 21st century. But for every one person who comes to Islamabad to enjoy the high life, so does another, who's likely to spend years or even decades scraping by. In many ways, this reflects life across Pakistan, where just twenty percent of the national population commands nearly half of its income. But like in many nations, Pakistan's capital city is a caricature of the problems faced elsewhere; they're bigger in Islamabad, and harder to ignore. This was a problem that the city's architect, C. A. Doxiadis, had tried to express before Islamabad was even built. In his own words, "A capital city exercises great influence on the entire country. Thus its inhabitants should not belong only to one social group (economic, political, ethnic, etc.), but should belong to as many groups as possible." Certainly, Doxiadis and the team behind Islamabad's master plan had not intended to fill their city with shanty towns; even if lower-class areas were explicitly segregated in the initial plan, they were at least built into the plan in the first place. But as Islamabad was built, the city's decision to abandon its master plan has led to the sort of haphazard urban sprawl where these avoidable problems only grow larger each year. In the face of this major issue, Islamabad has attempted to make itself better, but urban economic development has been badly underpowered in recent years, with not enough money traveling into the right areas to make a truly livable city. As the city has covered more and more territory, the surrounding forest has been lucky enough to survive, but rising temperatures and dryness in the region have prompted early signs of a pending ecological collapse, at the same time that Islamabad's population has continued to swell. And even today, the consequences of Islamabad's administrative separation from its neighbor Rawalpindi have led to haphazard expansion and even more wealth inequality; as much as both cities have intertwined, their decades-long history apart has led to Rawalpindi shouldering the burden of Islamabad's wealth inequality. When it comes to Islamabad's future, the unfortunate reality is that the city, and its people, can expect more of the same. The city's public works and infrastructure are crumbling from a lack of maintenance, and the few efforts the city has made to mitigate those problems, simply aren't enough. The city only just got a bus system in 2015, with no rail or other public, intra-city transit to speak of except for a mess of taxicabs and ride-shares. Because the city was never built to be population-dense, its developments continue to consume more and more land, increasing the city's surface area in a sprawl of single-family homes, but not fostering any of the dedicated centers that a city needs to thrive. In fact, the city has struggled to even regulate its own developments, with many of them being built illegally or without public approval, and Islamabad's near-complete dependency on cars has begun to make the city's major roads impassable. All things considered, we still must give credit to Islamabad for doing that one great, difficult thing that so many planned cities fail to do; put simply, it exists. People live there, it serves an important function, and it has forever avoided the list of misguided planned-city attempts that were dead on arrival. But as impressive as a feat Pakistan accomplished by building Islamabad, it's been chronically unable to follow through on delivering the city that Islamabad might have been. On its current course, Islamabad is headed down the long, painful road to urban decay, and unless something radical changes, that's precisely where the city will eventually end up. ## Key Takeaways - Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, was commissioned in 1959 and is one of the few successful planned cities. - The city's design, led by C. A. Doxiadis, aimed for a dynamic metropolis but faced implementation challenges. - Islamabad's rigid grid-iron pattern and income-stratified zones have led to a stark contrast between elite and poor areas. - The city's housing crisis has resulted in rapidly expanding slums, where many workers cannot afford to live. - Despite its modern amenities, Islamabad struggles with urban decay and infrastructure maintenance issues. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### When was Islamabad commissioned as Pakistan's capital? Islamabad was commissioned in 1959. ### What was the initial population plan for Islamabad? The city was planned to be built in stages, with new developments moving northeastward as needed, rather than sprawling out at random. ### What was the concept behind the design of Islamabad? The concept was a dynamopolis, a dynamic metropolis that would form the centerpiece of a broader metropolitan area, integrating with Rawalpindi and local national parks. ### Who was the urban planner for Islamabad? The urban planner for Islamabad was a Greek architect named C. A. Doxiadis. ### What were some of the initial challenges faced during the construction of Islamabad? The board in charge of Islamabad’s development had no say over Rawalpindi, leading to bureaucratic issues. Additionally, the city was built using vast numbers of laborers with simple tools, significantly slowing the construction pace. ### What is the current population of Islamabad's metro area? The metro-area population of Islamabad is more than two million. ### What are some of the major architectural landmarks in Islamabad? Major landmarks include the Presidential Palace, the Parliament House, the Secretariat building, and the Faisal Mosque, which is the fifth-largest mosque in the world. ### What is one of the major issues facing Islamabad today? One of the major issues is a housing crisis, where many laborers and service workers cannot afford housing in the city, leading to the growth of slums and shanty towns. ### How has Islamabad's administrative separation from Rawalpindi affected the cities? The separation has led to haphazard expansion and increased wealth inequality, with Rawalpindi shouldering the burden of Islamabad’s wealth disparity. ### What is the current state of public transportation in Islamabad? Islamabad only recently got a bus system in 2015, with no rail or other public, intra-city transit except for taxicabs and ride-shares. ## Sources - [Original MegaProjects video: Islamabad: The City Pakistan Built for its Social Elite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gm_maxN5Ig) - [https://www.britannica.com/place/Islamabad](https://www.britannica.com/place/Islamabad) - [https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/13/archives/the-talk-of-karachi-pakistans-metropolis-karachis-loyal-inhabitants.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/13/archives/the-talk-of-karachi-pakistans-metropolis-karachis-loyal-inhabitants.html) - [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/aug/17/buildingislamabad](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/aug/17/buildingislamabad) - [https://senate.gov.pk/en/parliament.php?id=-1&catid=4&subcatid=267&cattitle=Parliament%20House](https://senate.gov.pk/en/parliament.php?id=-1&catid=4&subcatid=267&cattitle=Parliament%20House) - [https://www.archnet.org/sites/263](https://www.archnet.org/sites/263) - [https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-slums-of-islamabad](https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-slums-of-islamabad) - [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/13/elite-privilege-consumes-17-4bn-of-pakistans-economy-undp](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/13/elite-privilege-consumes-17-4bn-of-pakistans-economy-undp) - [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-020-10172-w#Sec20](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-020-10172-w#Sec20) - [https://www.isocarp.net/data/case_studies/720.pdf](https://www.isocarp.net/data/case_studies/720.pdf) - [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43619514.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A1bce76f857cda8a10d709ef221a59d9f&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43619514.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A1bce76f857cda8a10d709ef221a59d9f&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1) - [https://pide.org.pk/research/the-islamabad-master-plan/](https://pide.org.pk/research/the-islamabad-master-plan/) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Karachi_from_above.jpg) by Bilalhassan88 / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage