Overview

Follow Lahore's Orange Line metro corridor to discover the tensions between development and displacement, progress and preservation, in one of the world's great metropolises. Lahore is a city in constant flux, and the frictions that characterize urban life are vividly apparent along the tracks of its first metro rail corridor, opened in 2020. Lahore in Motion follows the Orange Line's 27-kilometer path, bringing together reflections from academics, activists, artists, and architects on the ways that infrastructure shapes urban belonging. The book offers a novel methodology for assessing how this mega-project has reconfigured neighborhoods, sparked new desires for modernity, and deepened existing social differences while destabilizing others. Each chapter unfolds through the lens of a particular metro stop, providing intimate glimpses into the frictions generated by development where connectivity and fragmentation, aspiration and dispossession collide. Engaging with broader debates on urban transformation in the Global South, Lahore in Motion goes against familiar narratives of top-down development, revealing a city animated by resistance and reinventing itself in response. An eye-opening, beautifully written work for all interested in urbanism, infrastructure, politics, and the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world's most dynamic cities.

Full Product Details

9781800087835

Table of Contents

Reviews

""A compelling journey with electric insights about Lahore's old and new geographies one metro station at a time. Each author provides an intricate and personal gateway into the city to muse and reflect on how people live, aspire and remember.""-- ""Rashmi Sadana, author of The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure"" ""This brilliant collection of essays written by a stellar bunch of academics and practitioners is a critical addition to the expanding knowledge frontier on infrastructure and cities in Pakistan. Anchored in the mega-infrastructure project the Orange Line, the stories unfold at multiple scales and bring to life the contradictory effects of infrastructure's longstanding promise of a better urban future.""-- ""Nausheen Anwar, author of Infrastructure Redux: Crisis, Progress in Industrial Pakistan and Beyond"" ""Unfolding the personal and neighbourhood frictions lived along the Orange Line, a sensitive, accessible and scholarly portrait of contemporary city life emerges in these pages as a choir of discordant voices ruminate on the practical and symbolic logics of urban infrastructure."" -- ""Caroline Knowles, author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London"" ""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""

Author Information

Ammara Maqsood is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at UCL. Chris Moffat is Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary University of London. Fizzah Sajjad is an urban planner and geographer with research positions at the London School of Economics and the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

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