Travel to Pakistan: Lahore: Modern
Tired of old stuff? There's a modern Lahore, too.
But what do you make of this? The sign can be read by only a minority of even literate Pakistanis. Are we looking at the master language?
Off the mall: a shopping district for electronics.
Cell phones are especially popular.
We're six miles south of the Fort at Model Town, created in 1919 as the brainchild of a British-educated lawyer, Diwan Khem Chand. Familiar with Ebenezer Howard's work, Chand decided to build a garden city in Lahore. He set out to secure a thousand acres on which to build a thousand houses; in fact he secured 1,963 acres, on which 6,000 houses have been built. (This and the captions for the following pictures rely heavily on Chand's "Scheme for the Model Town and Its Realization," 1930, summarized by Aijazzudin's Lahore Recollected, 2003, pp. 206-212.)
Model Town is designed in eight superblocks around a ring road, which is two miles in circumference around a central park with a lake that was never built. Like so many grand areas on paper, on the ground the central park tends to scrub, although the parts hugging the ring are in various public uses, including schools.
One of the radial streets: houses were limited to covering no more than one-third of the lot.
The office today of the Model Town Co-operative Society; originally, it was the Club Building, from 1930. We're on the inner rim of the inner circle and on the side facing away from Lahore. This became the most exclusive part of Model Town.
The layout is complex but tidy.
Houses were divided into Class A, B, and C, with respectively larger and smaller lots. The Society itself acted as a builder and offered a hundred plans from which members could choose; many were designed by the Society's architect, M.C. Khanna. The result is not so far removed from Khem Chands's original idea of a town where "each house would be detached from the others and would be built Bungalow-like with some garden around it." Prakash Tandon writes, in chapter 16 of Punjabi Century that Model Town "was almost entirely populated by retired government officials, who all addressed each other as Rai Sahib, Rai Bahadur, Khan Sahib or Khan Bahadur, Sardar Sahib or Sardar Bahadur. One after the other, old engineers, army doctors, retired civilizans and session judges arrived on the spot and started laying their foundations. The results of their efforts were all curiously alike, because they were all patterned on the government bungalows which had been their homes, and the dak bungalows which had been the scene of so much of their activity."
Prakash Tandon continues: "Having spent their lives as officials, [the Model Town Residents] now all tried to run the Society office and its poor secretary, who usually never stayed in the job for long. The retired conservator of forests took him and the malis to task about the trees and road hedges; the engineers, depending upon the branch of Public Works Department (PWD) they had belonged to, forced their advice about the roads, buildings, canal water ditches and electricity; while the retired ICS just laid the law down about everything."
Many of Model Town's 6,000 homes are new, however, including some very high-style ones.
Model Town's commercial district is on the side of the ring facing Lahore. If you want more modern retail, you'll have to go to the nearby neighborhood of Gulberg.
And that's where we've come. The name Gulberg ("flower meadow") is farfetched, but here's where you'll find Lahore's upscale shopping district.
Plenty of new construction.
A shopping center.
An office building.
These malls are shiny but filled with tiny shops, as though a typical South Asian shopping street had been repackaged indoors.
A fair-sized shoe store.
The boys from Oak Brook. Here they stock McArabias, a hamburger in soft flatbread.
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