Lahore After the Modern: Architecture, Equality and Community in Yasmeen Lari’s Anguri Bagh

ABSTRACT

The problem of home was, in a sense, the founding problem of Pakistan: first, in the call for a new ‘homeland’ for South Asia’s Muslims, but also because its creation provoked displacement and a condition of homelessness. The population transfers and refugee camps that accompanied the 1947 partition of India were succeeded by housing crises prompted by industrialisation and urbanization. Debates over the responsibility of government authorities to address housing inequalities animated politics in Pakistan’s early decades, intersecting with global discourses around postcolonial development. This article approaches this history through one low-income housing scheme in Lahore. Designed in the 1970s by Yasmeen Lari, Anguri Bagh was constructed to provide improved accommodation to residents of an informal settlement. But it also sought to facilitate a sense of community and belonging by enlisting residents in the design process and channelling forms and rhythms familiar from local history. Anguri Bagh’s successes and failures provide critical insights into the relationship between design and equality in this historical moment, shaped by a faltering faith in modernism and the recuperative gestures of postcolonial culture. The article approaches the architect as an overlooked figure in intellectual history and architecture as a vital space for thinking about inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• modernism
• housing
• inequality
• Pakistan
• urban history

Acknowledgments

I am indebted first and foremost to Yasmeen Lari for her time and generosity, and to my many interlocutors in Anguri Bagh, Lahore. The foundations for this essay were set at a 2019 workshop on Asian Modernisms at University College London; its form was extended and consolidated at the Aarhus symposium which generated this special issue. Thanks to the organisers of these events for the space to build, to Marvi Mazhar and Andrew Arsan for conversations around key themes, and to Majed Akhter and Frank Gerits for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For recent, revisionist attempts to unpick modernism’s association with Eurocentric ideas of progress, challenging a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model of global influence, see Prakash et al, eds, Rethinking Global Modernism and Cheng et al, eds, Race and Modern Architecture.

2 Frampton, Modern Architecture, 280.

3 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 7.

4 For a fine-grained account of these dynamics across a range of contexts, see Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism.

5 Aalto, “R.I.B.A. Annual Discourse,” 258.

6 For a comprehensive study of this project and its wider context, see Daechsel, Islamabad.

7 Karim, “Pakistan Papers.”

8 Karim, “Sculpted Landscape.”

9 For a classic account in English, see Ali, Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power.

10 Christiansen et al, “Towards a Global Intellectual History of an Unequal World.”

11 Bell and Zacka, eds. Political Theory and Architecture, 1.

12 I have explored these ideas elsewhere in Moffat, “Building, Dwelling, Dying.”

13 My narrative here builds on several years of correspondence with Yasmeen Lari and two formal, in-depth interviews: the first over phone on 10 November 2016, and the second in Karachi on 5 February 2019.

14 There is an echo here of Samuel Moyn’s critique, cited by the editors of this special issue, of the minimalist or sufficientarian demands of human rights, as against a more robust project of equality and flourishing. See Moyn, Not Enough.

15 On Pakistan as political idea, see Devji, Muslim Zion.

16 Khan, Muslim Becoming, 21–2.

17 Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina, 4. Devji, with a nod to Hegel, evokes another form in the conclusion to his book, Muslim Zion, where he suggests that Pakistan is a sepulchre, a mausoleum. The country’s founding in 1947, for Devji, can be seen as constituting ‘the grave of Islam as an ecumenical religion with its own form of politics’ (248): the end of a particular history of identification and affiliation which succumbed (to animate a critique articulated earlier by Muhammad Iqbal) to the seduction of objects – the idolatry of a ‘homeland’ and the embrace of a nation-state.

18 On the longer history of such imaginings, see Qasmi and Robb, “Introduction.”

19 Zamindar, The Long Partition.

20 See, for instance, The Punjab: A Review of the First Three Years (August 1947 to August 1950), a pamphlet issued by the Director of Public Relations, Punjab in 1952. Civil Secretariat Library, Punjab Provincial Archives, Lahore, Acc. No. E1-8. The pamphlet notes that nearly two million more people had arrived in Pakistani Punjab than the number of Hindus and Sikhs who had left for India.

21 Daechsel, “Sovereignty, Governmentality and Development,” 137–8; Daechsel, Islamabad.

22 See Ibid. but also Rajani and Rajani, “Making Karachi.”

23 Malik, “Public Authority and Local Resistance.”

24 See, for instance, Akhtar, The Politics of Common Sense.

25 For an important account of this war and its legacies, see Mookherjee, Spectral Wound.

26 Bhutto, “Pakistan Builds Anew.”

27 For a portrait of this moment, see Toor, State of Islam, especially Chapter 5.

28 A retrospective on “Three Years of People’s Government Rule” in The Pakistan Times, 6 April 1975, by S Abid Ali, described Bhutto’s efforts in ‘putting the damaged wagons on the rails again, in repairing the crumpled structure of country’s [sic] economy, in infusing a new life and a greater urge for progress against the masses, and in replacing depression with a sense of realistic optimism, better prospects and prosperity.’

29 “More Houses” [Editorial], Pakistan Times, 24 February 1975.

30 Alongside an emphasis on large-scale urban housing schemes and improvement in rural dwellings, the PPP’s national housing policy identified a need for ‘providing people in the low-income groups with land and credit facilities, enabling them to proceed with the construction of houses according to their needs and resources.’ See the “Housing Policy” editorial in Pakistan Times, 11 August 1975, which voiced concerns about ‘bureaucratic bottlenecks’ threatening this latter option and urged the government to look at post-war housing policies in Europe and Japan.

31 Vandal, “Architecture in the Post-Colonial Lahore,” 207.

32 ‘Collected Minutes of Architecture Advisory Committee, College of Technology, Oxford’, Oxford Brookes University (OBU) Archives.

33 The full curriculum is detailed in the 1960–61 Prospectus, Oxford College of Technology School of Architecture, OBU Archives.

34 See for instance Lari, “My Un-Learning … ”

35 “Editorial,” D: The Student Architect, No. 3 (1963), OBU Archives.

36 Oliver was researcher in the School of Architecture’s Institute for Sustainable Development and served for many years as Associate Head of Architecture. The Paul Oliver Vernacular Architecture Library, which includes over 20,000 images taken by Oliver over the course of his 50-year career, is part of the Oxford Brookes University Library at Headington.

37 The notion of the twenty-two actually originated with Ayub Khan’s Chief Economist in the Planning Commission, the Cambridge and Yale-trained economist Mahbub ul Haq. In an April 1968 address, he outlined how Pakistan’s richest families controlled, by his calculations, 66 per cent of the industrial sector and owned 87 per cent of the banking and insurance industry. After Ayub Khan was deposed, Haq refused to join Bhutto’s government due to his opposition to socialism. He was later Minister of Finance for Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. See White, Industrial Concentration.

38 Interview with Yasmeen Lari, Karachi, 5 February 2019; See also Lari, “Industry.”

39 The first woman to complete the NCA’s architecture diploma, Yasmin Cheema, graduated in 1966. See NCA Archives, File No. 234E – she is noted by the surname Tufail. Cheema is today one of Pakistan’s leading conservation architects and is affiliated with COMSATS University Lahore.

40 Lari recounts her contribution was expected on an ‘honorary basis’! See Lari, “My Un-Learning … ,” 53.

41 Ibid. 50, 53.

42 The AKTC, in collaboration with the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, host the vast and open access online resource ArchNet.org on the architecture and built environment of Muslim societies.

43 Lari, “Project Summary,” 4.

44 Hasan-Uddin Khan, “Profile: Yasmeen Lari,” Mimar 2 (1981), 50.

45 Pakistan Times, 7 October 1973

46 Lari, “My Un-Learning … ”

47 For the particular story of Mumtaz, see Moffat, “Building, Dwelling, Dying.” It is worth noting that another prominent member of this generation, the Karachi-based Habib Fida Ali, would stick steadily to modernist principles and forms throughout his career.

48 For contrast, see Martin, Utopia’s Ghost.

49 Scott, Refashioning Futures, 14.

50 See Qasmi, “A Master Narrative … ” for an analysis of Orientalist legacies in Pakistani historiography more generally.

51 Lari, “My Un-Learning … ,” 51.

52 Glover, Making Lahore Modern.

53 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Interview with Yasmeen Lari, Karachi, 5 February 2019.

54 For a recent, perceptive reflection on Jacobs’ influence, see Hatherley, “Where are All the People?”

55 Lari, “Architecture and Politics … ,” 4–5.

56 Khan, “Profile,” 51.

57 Moffat, “Building, Dwelling, Dying.” Mumtaz’s Kot Karamat project, designed in the late 1960s outside of Lahore, similarly experimented with local materials and unskilled labour to create an agricultural compound with storage sheds and workers’ housing. On tropical architecture more generally, see Solano-Meza, “Against a Pedagogical Colonization” and Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture.”

58 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 28.

59 Akcan, Architecture in Translation, 8.

60 Leslie, “Atomic Structures,” 230–7.

61 Toor, State of Islam, 121; see also Maqsood, New Pakistani Middle Class.

62 For one example of this critique, see Lari, Traditional Architecture of Thatta, vii.

63 “Aga Khan Award for Architecture.” Aga Khan Development Project [website]. Accessed 10 August 2021. https://www.akdn.org/architecture.

64 Lari was also responsible, in her position with the IAP, for the establishment of a statutory registration body – the Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners (PCATP) – that has enabled a process of accreditation for professional architects in the country. National Documentation Wing, Cabinet Division, Islamabad, File No. 138/Prog/81.

65 “Aga Khan Award to Promote Muslim Unity: Zia,” Pakistan Times, 24 October 1980.

66 This, in spite of the fact that Fathy’s New Gourna experiment found some of its fiercest critics among the very people who were to inhabit it. See Pyla, “The Many Lives of New Gourna.”

67 Hasan, “Orangi Pilot Project,” 9, 15.

68 Davidson and Serageldin, Architecture beyond Architecture, 56–63.

69 Lari, “Lines Area Resettlement Project.”

70 On this aspect of Lari’s work, see Moffat, “History in Pakistan … ”

71 Heritage Foundation, Build Back Safer … , 3; Moffat, “History in Pakistan … ”

72 For a recent account of this phenomenon, focused on New York but speaking to a global context, see Madden and Marcuse, In Defence of Housing.

73 See Christiansen and Jensen, “Histories of Global Inequality” for a critical account of the state as dominant frame for thinking about inequality. For a defence of the role of social movements and civil society in combatting inequality against the over-extensions of states, see Burawoy, “Facing an Unequal World.”