An Atlas of Urban Transformation

Lahore, Pakistan

By Khadija Munir
right to the city, infrastructures of mobility, investment disparity, urban planning, public realm, community engagement, crowd-sourced data, visualize, reveal, connect, urban renewal, real-estate speculation, open data, community engagement, urban development.

An additive, interactive and participatory mapping platform serving as a citizen's repository to infrastructure projects in Lahore, Pakistan.

The urban renewal attempts, infrastructure development projects and the absence of a coherent urban policy has transformed Lahore into a fragmented city with a contested future. The spatial and temporal dynamics of transit- infrastructure development has instigated continued disparity, displacement, inequality and is highly distanced from the socio-spatial realities of the citizens. Generally, in Pakistan, the process of urban planning and decision making about communities, lacks citizen participation, which is why most of the government development plans are detached from what’s going on.

Given the contested socio-spatial reality of the city, and the role of International agencies in its urban transformation, how can the Actors (citizens and community organizations) be recuperated, Prepared and synergized in the city-making process.

In the overarching narrative of the design proposal, this project intends to fight the imposed urban imaginary birthed by the foreign and national agents and seeks to replace it with a deliberate one, instigated at the community level. The idea of the intermediary platform between the citizens and the governments, will hold them accountable publicly and initiate the need and gaps in the way urban practices are conducted. It is about the need to re-imagine the city with the common man’s perspective. How to fight the constant displacement, reinvestment and disinvestment, which come at much powerful scale then we anticipate? Through intensive data collection and mapping on Carto and QGIS, I collected and spatialized demographic data as well as a data repository of infrastructure projects. Most of these data sets are self-collected and digitized. The map below shows most of the data collected. In an under-mapped city such as Lahore, where data is not made available to public, and if done so, it is very obscure, it was very important to make this data public and establish a methodology by which citizens can keep adding to it.

Recognizing existing communities of practice and addressing the shortcomings and pitfalls in the current citizen and organizations mobilizations and concerted efforts, I designed an additive, interactive and participatory mapping platform, which brings together a data repository of all the transit - infrastructure projects, past, current and proposed, spatializes them and preserves a citizen’s narrative of them. Events, such as protests, public hearings, town halls, or court hearings held in opposition to an infrastructure project are documented and will be added to continuously. Actors such as the government and organizations implementing these projects or mobilizing against them are also mapped out so citizens can form connections with them. Through the “resources tab”, it aims to informs the local citizens of the laws and the legal rights that they have to contribute input in the city-making process and fight any form of uninformed displacement and land acquisition.

Browsing through the website you can use any of the drop down menus to filter through the collected data to see which events have been reported around a transit-infrastructure project. You can filter through the type of organizations and people active in these urban scenarios and see who is involved and what actions they have taken. A list of impacts of these infrastructure projects is also present, which gives the citizens an idea about what’s enfolding in their surroundings and at the same time familiarizes them with these impacts so they can report these in the future. Through a single click on any selected point, one gets more information about the project, an image pertaining the project, the year at which It was completed, who implemented it and links to more resources and news article.

The mapping portal also intends to visualize the city, to preserve the current Urban ephemera and document the “change”. A substantial part of my research focus is on the erasure of image and memory in the city. Google earth does not have many street views for Lahore, Pakistan except for a few tourist-heavy spots, so I want to design a component, which incorporates photos and videos of the city, by me or the people willing to document and share. The visual ephemera component is accessed by clicking the image of the project in the drop-down menu and it takes you to 360 view of the area.

The platform intends to layout things in clarity for the users. The “How-to” tab takes you an information reporting map, where you can drop a pin and record your event. You can report about any proposed infrastructure project that you are aware of, or if you know about any public hearing being held, so people can connect and be a part of it. It’s an exercise of mapping and revealing the actors and situations in the city.

The website as a crowd-sourced information repository is a means to give the citizens data about what is happening in their surroundings, so they can mobilize at the right time and take the right action. It is to create connections with resources and organizations who can help them best, before they give in to what is destined for them. It intends to spark a conversation among the residents, community organizations and the government. It is by no means, a solution for the persistent problems. In fact, it is only one step in the right direction, with so many more to follow. It is a continuously developing platform, with resources, images, links to new projects and scenarios being added as received. It seeks to form the basis of a deliberative urban practice instead of an imposed on.