At the turn of the mid-20th century in Pakistan, in between the post-war era of 1965 and the two-decade-long rush of the Great Partition which occurred in 1947, Islamabad came into being as a modern bespoke metropolitan city designed by a foreign architect, Doxiadis. Planned, seemingly clean, and equipped with an organized infrastructure and abundant recurring green spaces amidst a strictly orthogonal street grid, Islamabad post-independence was designed on the concept that symbolized unfettered growth. As Hull[1] explains while designing the communal structure, Doxiadis believed in homogenizing neighbourhoods based on their income brackets thereby employing a bureaucratic approach of socially stratifying the city. This research examines how this approach has impacted the socio-cultural construct of neighbourhoods in Islamabad today by exploring the community’s spatial practices within a socially stratified Class-IV low-income[2] ‘Modern Mohalla’ in the Government Housing Quarters of G-9/2, Islamabad. It seeks to investigate this theme by identifying and studying female lived experiences and their informal socio-spatial appropriations in this neighbourhood.

As an Islamabadi, I grew up listening to the word ‘Mohalla’ which I immediately linked with my neighbours, neighbourhood, and neighbourly relations. Foregrounding this research inquiry in Madison’s theory of subjective engagement with socio-spatial relations via my positionality as a researcher who feels morally obligated to redress the repressed female representation in my city, I explore whether Mohalla-making is more of an intangible series of Ziddi socio-spatial practices translated into the built environment through the informal mediation of women.

As this research is grounded in the absence of female representation in a communal structure, this dissertation examines the lack of designed feminist spaces within a Mohalla of Islamabad that have inevitably given an impetus to ‘radical’ Mohalla-making practices as recorded via the oral testimonies of the female participants as a part of the research methodology. Introvert spaces that are reflective of the Islamic cultural construct of spaces in a Mohalla, since the time of the Mughals within the subcontinent, in the form of interior courtyards, rooftops, and balconies, are observed in the built environment as planned spaces in the Modern Mohalla being studied. Therefore, addressing this absence of feminist spaces and their reclamation by establishing a deeper ethnographic dialogue with the ‘other’, as Madison suggests, in this case, the concealed spaces of feminist appropriation that are being explored in this dissertation, is imperative to comprehend the complex socio-spatial structure of the Mohalla. The research further grounds itself in De Certeau’s theory of ‘strategies’ which is associated with Doxiadis’ role as the omniscient master planner of Islamabad’s communities versus the innate ‘tactics’ developed as a response by the female residents of the Modern Mohalla. This research seeks to explore this hypothesis while reflecting on the oral testimonies of the female participants as a part of the research methodology.

When one explores Islamabad’s existing literature and archival history to address this research inquiry, one notices a glaring gap in the documentation of its people’s rich and complex lived histories, particularly women, and their relation with the built environment through their communal practices. Historians and academics such as Doxiadis himself, Daeschel, and Hull, whose work has been examined in this dissertation, have written about Islamabad under the umbrella of urban design and policymaking that matter-of-factly state quantitative statistics about the city’s master planning process. Concerning urban informalities in Islamabad and overarchingly Pakistan, academics such as Moffat look into other housing communities and their architecture such as the Anguri Bagh in Lahore designed by a female architect yet not focusing on the female lived experience. Moatasim,[3] as a female author, on the other hand, despite writing about the slum settlements in Islamabad that depict an unplanned ‘informal’ architectural tectonic language, does not record the lives of women in these informal settlements and their contribution towards the creation of these informal urban spatial practices informed by their communal norms. My dissertation fills in this gap by aiming to highlight and call out the paradoxical situation where female representation and their lived experiences in these important informal urban spaces are completely hidden in formalized modernist settlements. By revealing the informal feminist spatial practices of the women in the ‘Modern Mohalla’ of G-9/2 as an acknowledgment of the female presence in the communal structure, which is otherwise buried beneath the profession of their spouses, this research aims to highlight and record the unrecorded qualitative aspect of the female contribution to the community’s socio-spatial relationships as a part of the Mohalla culture.

The dissertation also studies Doxiadis’ illustrations of the communal structure as an archival resource used while planning Islamabad and explores how it has been actualized today in the socio-spatial context of the Modern Mohalla in G-9/2 by its residents. Even though Islamabad was the epitome of a ‘70s poster child, the city has always been considered more organized and sociologically planned than its contemporaries (Lahore and Karachi) as explained by Keller,[4] an urban sociologist, who deems the city as one of Doxiadis’ greatest urban projects of designing for mixed communities. However, this research seeks to unveil the reality of Keller’s statement as the study site displays a planned homogeneity on a neighbourhood level. In reality the ‘mixed’ nature of communities is only discovered when the female participants share their oral testimonies showcasing their ethnicities and heritage. This study due to time constraints will not be studying Islamabad as a whole but will focus on one ‘Modern Mohalla’/neighbourhood to investigate how Doxiadis’ designs are manifested at that level. The documentation of the oral histories and traditions of the women as a part of this research simultaneously questions the impact of Doxiadis’ planning strategy of Ekistics in the Modern Mohalla’s communal structure and how it facilitates feminist Mohalla-making practices as an act of emancipation in an otherwise patriarchal setup.

The untold realities of the Modern Mohalla are explored further by revealing and deciphering the historiography of Mohallas and their formation in the South Asian context. As the following step, this research seeks to trace the relationship between Doxiadis’ theory of Ekistics i.e., understanding human settlements with relevance to their cultural context, and how it impacts the communal structure he planned and their communal exercises in G-9/2’s Modern Mohalla today. It investigates and identifies gaps in feminist representation in communal spaces and how their lack of participation in the original process has influenced the nature of their informal acts of Mohalla-making. The ‘domesticized’ acts of feminist Mohalla-making executed by the participants of this study are seen under the lens of Hook’s theory of ‘Homeplace’. By investigating the dichotomy between these female communal practices as an act of celebrating their ‘Behn-Chara’(sisterhood) that simultaneously fuels their socio-cultural confirmative role within a socially stratified patriarchal setup, Hook’s argument is foregrounded in this unique phenomenon that the women in the Modern Mohalla present. This research also comments on the nature of the feminist Mohalla-making practices as a post-colonial space for the ‘other’ as suggested by Madison[5] and works toward the development of a dialogue with a group of women (the ‘others’) whose lives have been previously unobserved within the premise of the Modern Mohalla’s preconceived socio-urban fabric.

As its research methodology, this dissertation engages with an ethnically diverse set of women living in the Government Housing Quarters of G-9/2 via interviews to develop a critical ethnography of their lived histories as drawings supported by calligraphic commemorations of their oral testimonies. By applying Tayob’s[6] methodology of drawing as a research tool to study and portray subaltern feminist Mohalla-making practices, this methodological approach seeks to respect their privacy and maintain their anonymity which is an integral part of their Islamic culture. The oral testimony of the female participants is collected which informs this dissertation’s research inquiry of how the historical socio-spatial values are at risk of being lost and can be recovered by deciphering their Mohalla-making practices. Drawing as a tool for ethnographic research is used to shed light on the absence of female subaltern representation within the archival and critical historiographical forefront of Islamabad. This methodological approach illustrates the role of the women in this Modern Mohalla as historical actors, communal leaders, and autonomous social visionaries. Drawing as a research tool in this dissertation foregrounds the participant’s privacy under Glissant’s theory of opacity whereby the documentation of feminist lived experiences does not need to be seen via the Western lens of explicit transparency. This research seeks to recognize and illustrate the mundane[7] moments that are documented and analyzed in the subsequent chapters via the narratives of the following characters:

Umaima , Laiba, Sania, Chacha, and Aliya.[8]