The way we share and experience cities has transformed dramatically; few embody this change like Lahore – once the heart of the subcontinent, it is now a sprawling metropolis of contradictions. Beneath its rapid growth lies a city layered with centuries of history, empire and faith, now obscured by smog, flooding and unchecked expansion. Once the ‘City of Gardens’ Lahore has traded much of its tree cover for hurried development. Its 15 million residents live amid political instability, widening inequality and environmental decay, which are reshaping the city at an unprecedented pace.
Today Lahore functions less as a unified city and more as a collection of small towns governed by a centralised, unresponsive system. To preserve its living spirit we must decentralise how we learn, plan and take action – shifting the focus from top-down visions to the neighbourhoods and lived experiences that truly hold the city together and deserve due attention.
Lahore’s unchecked expansion erodes its centuries-old character. Rapid interventions – often short-term and image-driven – ignore the city’s need to manage within its means and provide fundamental rights and amenities to all citizens. As the highly acclaimed author Mohsin Hamid observes, ‘Cities like Lahore are changing so fast that one feels constantly a sense of mourning – for streets, trees, houses, and ways of being that vanish before our eyes’1.
Farmland, our source of food, is now construction ground. Borrowed dreams of becoming the next Dubai or Paris have replaced an ethic of ecology, sustainability and community. A visible lack of ownership and identity manifests in suburban palaces mimicking classical European styles, while no urban-scale public spaces or parks have been developed since the 1980s. Generations have grown up without meaningful communal spaces, their social lives absorbed by digital worlds.
As public life retreats online the need to reimagine a shared physical common grows increasingly urgent. Despite some sincere officials and experts, the city continues to expand like an unmanageable organism, where even (few) well-intended projects or infrastructure – underpasses, bridges, highways – rarely improve civic life.
To list some recent significant projects as examples, the River Ravi Development exemplifies how expansion disregards ecology and law. Built on the river’s floodplain – now mostly dry and polluted – it replaces fertile fields, displaces farmers and invites construction in hazardous zones. The Central Business District, replacing a rare green tract around an old historic airport, promises glass towers and profit while ignoring environmental costs
or compensation for the inevitable ensuing carbon emissions. Similarly the proposed Yellow Line Rail along the canal, a landmark feature of Lahore, threatens to fell thousands of mature trees in violation of the Lahore Canal Heritage Park Act 2013, while public transport buses already serve this corridor.
Smaller gestures hint at better possibilities: new bus routes and sidewalks in Gulberg, though limited, in posh areas, show that small-scale, people-oriented improvements can work – if extended to less affluent areas. A pilot to revive sections of Mall Road as a walkable civic space offers hope for future partnerships between public institutions and citizens, as well as for the potential of quality architecture and programming for public use. The Lahore Biennale, too, reclaims historic sites as arenas of artistic and social interest and exchange, as the public is drawn to reappropriated sites and installations – sometimes bringing historic and forgotten buildings back to life. As curator John Tain notes:
By placing historic sites in dialogue with more contemporary works, LB03 [the third edition of the Lahore Biennale, held in 2024] brings to light the ways the city’s celebrated culture, architecture, and gardens . . . symbolise its palimpsest of connections . . . with more recent conversations about the significance of historical and indigenous forms of knowledge.2
Lahore’s potential for renewal is overshadowed by the escalating crises it faces – above all, climate change and environmental decay. Once celebrated in poetry monsoon rains have become a feared natural disaster – not to mention that Lahore regularly records some of the world’s worst air quality, causing many to seek medical treatment, while almost the entire population wears precautionary face masks. The climate emergency reveals both ecological fragility and institutional paralysis: centralised systems remain unable to adapt. Why have grand development ambitions produced such a decline?
The city can no longer afford low-density sprawl. In a heavily indebted nation resources must be directed towards essentials. Even as aspiring world-class towers rise, many citizens still lack even a basic footpath.
Urban planner and researcher Dr Fizzah Sajjad notes, ‘It is critical to revisit our approach to land, which fails to meet housing needs while worsening food insecurity, air quality, and rising temperatures. Change can only come through dialogue, stakeholder pressure, and the democratisation of planning’3.
A decentralised governance model is essential. Lahore can be read as a network of smaller towns – distinct yet interlinked – where a revived local government can respond to all citizens. Within this fabric coexist informal settlements, absorbed villages and industrial pockets. Conventional tools – master plans, zoning, statistics – flatten such differences. Seeing Lahore through its lived, everyday realities enables a more equitable understanding grounded in local knowledge, history and experience.
A decentralised lens also reorients power and authorship: instead of a single governable mass, Lahore becomes a constellation of neighbourhoods, each with its own spatial logic. Always dynamic the city’s edges offer many lessons as well. Peripheral communities demonstrate resilience often invisible to official frameworks, revealing the intelligence embedded in informal systems – knowledge too long dismissed as unplanned.
Distinguishing between data and lived experience and embracing participatory planning can yield genuine strategies for sustainable growth. Decentralised observation thus becomes both a method and a politics – one that invests directly and honestly in the life of the city.
To learn from its layered history and move toward a self-reliant urban ecosystem, Lahore needs a horizontal system of engagement that builds participation and ownership. Well-planned collaborations among citizens and institutions, employing advanced, easily accessible technologies, could weave a real-time network of awareness and response – a living laboratory for the city’s renewal.
Lahore’s future lies not in imitation but in introspection and rediscovery – through its people, neighbourhoods and collective memory. With a renewed sense of understanding and relationship between us and our land – not real estate – we may find ways to overcome the burdens we create. Hopefully, in the future, the famous saying will become ever so relevant again: Jinne Lahore ni vekhya, o jamya nai! (One who hasn’t seen Lahore hasn’t been born yet!)
