A Garden City in a Forest: Viewing Improvement from Unruly Ground

About This Event

In the early-twentieth century, as earlier forms of agrarian “improvement” were taking on urban dimensions, Model Town, a now-iconic town planning experiment, laid the groundwork for the direction of future planning in the city of Lahore, Pakistan. The project’s history as a modern garden suburb, where social aspirations are translated into spatial form, is well known. In this talk, Nida Rehman will attend instead to the drawn-out and not always smooth processes of enclosure, privatization, and improvement. She will examine the conversion of indigenous scrub forest in Lahore’s outskirts, first into an irrigated plantation, and then into the model garden suburb. Such a perspective from the ground reveals, she argues, relations, inhabitations and latent futures that remain buried when the story of the city is told only through the demarcations and abstractions of development.

Featured Guests

• Nida Rehman, Associate Professor School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University

Co-sponsors

• Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Rochester Institute of Technology