Islamabad’s expansion: opportunity or chaos?

Along the tree-lined highway leading into Islamabad, billboards advertise housing developments that boast golf courses, water parks and towering sculptures of horse heads -- markers of a real estate sector that has expanded the boundaries of Pakistan’s capital which was designed to be a haven from urban sprawl, reports Bloomberg.

Islamabad’s master plan envisioned a city of the future for the country’s civil servants, grid-like and orderly in stark contrast to the original capital Karachi. The once-pioneering document created a capital city from scratch, but has since become the subject of a lengthy debate about how to regulate its unruly growth.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is the latest leader tasked with getting a handle on the breakneck speed of Islamabad’s development after the caretaker government before him started a review process for the master plan, and previous efforts fizzled out.

The stakes are high for Islamabad residents as its ballooning population puts pressure on resources like water, food and electricity. Islamabad is already facing a water crisis that authorities are looking to solve by constructing new dams on the outskirts of the city.

“It’s like urban development on steroids,” said Ahmed Zaib Khan, an urban planner and former member of a federal commission tasked to review Islamabad’s master plan in 2019.

At the time of Islamabad’s creation in the 1960s, Russia and the US were vying for influence in the region. Pakistan was also eyeing the advancements of rival India, which had built a new French-designed state capital, Chandigarh, shortly after partition in 1947.

Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis designed Islamabad during a period of martial law under military leader Ayub Khan, who wanted a capital adjacent to the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi. With Islamabad, Khan hoped to send world leaders a message, said Saboohi Sarshar, an architect who has researched Islamabad’s genesis.

“This city was his way of telling them that Pakistan is a modern nation,” she said.

Islamabad holds an allure for being unlike other Pakistani cities -- which some officials credit to the document that created it. The capital, which sits alongside the lush Margalla Hills, is considered safer than its counterparts and is the base for many international organizations and foreign diplomats.

In an office of the planning wing at the Capital Development Authority, large-scale diagrams of the master plan line the walls and a book titled Islamabad the Beautiful sits on the desk. “There's a lot of support from the people to keep going with the original master plan,” said Ijaz Ahmed Sheikh, director of the master plan at CDA. “This is the only planned city in the country, and they want the other cities to be like Islamabad.”

Still, others question whether the master plan is equipped to guide the city’s development. Islamabad has mushroomed rapidly outward over the past three decades, growing at around 1,200 acres (5 square kilometres) per year, according to a 2020 study by WWF-Pakistan.

This sprawl is fueled by Pakistan’s powerful real estate sector, which markets plots of land as one of the only stable investments in an otherwise volatile economy.

“In Pakistan, it’s only the land industry that’s surviving,” said Shafiq Ali Siddiqui, a retired civil servant who started working for CDA in 1968.

He added that developers have received permission to build in the city’s periphery through a combination of “connections, influence and corruption,” resulting in a master plan that is “highly changed” through a series of ad hoc regulations and ordinances.

Over the years, the private sector has been involved in numerous scams that cheat buyers into buying plots that don’t exist in housing developments that sometimes never materialize. There are around 150 illegal developments in and around Islamabad, according to CDA estimates.

Islamabad has also been slow to adopt vertical housing, limiting development in the city’s original sectors and fueling expansion outward, said Naveed Iftikhar, an urban strategist. “These housing societies are a response to inefficient urban planning.”

Previous efforts to revamp Islamabad’s master plan include those by former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who formed a federal commission to review it. The commission surveyed residents about key challenges in the city in preparation for plan revisions.

But progress stalled and several members of the commission resigned in frustration. “We understood what was happening,” Khan, the urban planner said. “They wanted to bring in a lot of private sector interest to influence the process.”

Several international brands including Hilton and Radisson have recently announced plans for hotels near Islamabad. Other notable projects include a housing development by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris.

Pakistan’s interior ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the revision of Islamabad’s master plan.

Islamabad’s capacity has also been stretched by its fast-growing population. Over the past four decades, it has more than tripled due to the influx of internal migrants and working professionals. The population of Islamabad District, which includes areas surrounding the capital, reached 2.4 million in 2023 from 2 million in 2017, according to census data.

The original master plan included housing for the bureaucratic class but failed to create enough spaces for people from other income groups, pushing them to the city’s periphery while also fueling informal settlements within its original boundaries. Although Islamabad is seen as a city for the elite, around 38 per cent of its population lives in slums, according to a 2020 report by Unicef.

“It wasn't implemented as intended and so these housing-like schemes for low-income workers were never built,” said Faiza Moatasim, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Southern California. Despite its problems, Islamabad continues to attract Pakistanis such as Aamna Asghar, who moved there in 2023 for a fellowship with the federal planning department.