Lahore In Motion: Infrastructure, History and Belonging In Urban Pakistan

‘A lovely, mind-boggling tapestry of a book. Lahore in Motion gives us sharp, short glimpses into how Lahore lives, dies, plays, goes to work, prays, celebrates, resists and surrenders. Intimate forays into how a city reinvents itself, struggles to breathe and remembers that other imagined Lahore of legends.’ - Mohammed Hanif, author of Rebel English Academy

Lahore in Motion provides a portrait of the Pakistani metropolis by tracing the path of the city’s first metro rail corridor. Construction for this major piece of public infrastructure began in 2015 and, over subsequent years, the nascent ‘Orange Line’ rapidly reconfigured Lahore’s urban landscape – displacing residents and slicing through existing structures along its route, all while offering Lahoris the promise of ‘world-class’ public transportation. The volume collects stories from a series of walks along the metro’s 27-kilometre path, bringing together a wide variety of authors – including academics and activists, architects and artists – to reflect on the relationship between urban change and belonging in a historic city.

Each chapter is organised around a particular station on the metro, but the volume moves far beyond the neighbourhoods shadowed by the train’s elevated track. Contributors navigate the friction generated by the Orange Line’s construction and reflect on how this project of connection both responds to and produces fragmentation in the urban environment. The book brings together critical insights on the politics of infrastructure in South Asia and the desires and dispossessions fuelling projects of development in the Global South, assessing how they unevenly inflect the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world’s most populous cities.