The people in the city of the nation : re-viewing Islamabad's fifth function

This thesis is about Islamabad's center. Islamabad is a city built from scratch. It was the "dream" of Ayub Khan-Pakistan's gregarious and globe-trotting general-cum-president-and the product of its chief master planner, Constantinos Doxiadis-the gregarious and globe-trotting architect-cum-global development expert. Endowed with a propensity for large-scale planning, both operated with a hubris-laden confidence in developing rational solutions to urban and national dilemmas, technocratic strategies employed as a means to realize grand visions. In this way, Islamabad was conceived by both as part of something much larger-Ayub's symbol of a freshly unified nation, steeped in nationalist fervor and draped with the dreams of progress, development and national unity, and Doxiadis's far-reaching vision of "Ecumenopolis", a planetary-scale entity of the far-distant future. Rationality and dreams form the structural and symbolic basis upon which Islamabad and its core were conceived and constructed; yet its envelopment in the dialectic of rationality and dreams, of practice and theory, has prevented Islamabad from developing its own cohesion independent of these larger visions. Functionally deficient and overly symbolic, what exists in Islamabad's central area today is not realized dreams but what emerged in between them. This thesis uncovers the story of how Islamabad's central axis and its terminus-the major buildings of Pakistan's Capital Complex-came to be what they are today.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Mohr, Robert Allen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Julian Beinart.

• Urban Studies and Planning.
• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49870

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/49870