Walking the metro line in Lahore
Posted on 4th March, 2025
Published last month, 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.
To mark the book’s publication, we are proud to share an extract from the introduction that explains why the stories from a series of walks along the metro’s 27-kilometre path are important in reflecting on the relationship between urban change and belonging in a historic city.
In October 2020, Pakistan’s first rapid transit metro train was inaugurated in Lahore. The ‘Orange Line’, as it is known, has dramatically reconfigured Pakistan’s second largest city. The metro connects the north-east of Lahore to its south-west along a 27-kilometre route dotted with 26 stations. In a city of 13 million, the train has the capacity to accommodate 30,000 passengers per hour. For most of its path across Lahore, the line takes the form of a viaduct, a raised track elevated over existing roadways, casting a shadow on the buildings and lives that fall beneath. For less than 2 kilometres near its midway point, where the line intersects with the old colonial-era thoroughfare of Lahore, the Mall Road, the metro dips briefly underground.
Even before the line was opened to the public, the monumental form of the viaduct was being integrated into the everyday rhythms of the environments it crossed. Its huge pillars provided ample space for posters and advertisements – cheap buses to Islamabad, news of an upcoming political rally. The paved or bricked islands it created in the middle of traffic-filled streets were turned, where they were wide enough, into new spaces for sociality or trade – men playing ludo near Bund Road, cans of paint for sale on Nicholson Road. Some of these islands acquired young gardens, or were planted with small trees, though much of this greenery wilted early on, covered in layers of dust, hidden from the sky by the viaduct and so unable to be refreshed by rain.
This process of incorporation into Lahori life has not been without its frictions. When construction of the Orange Line was announced in 2015, it prompted vocal opposition across a range of interest groups, from civil society activists to party politicians, religious leaders to local residents’ groups. Although never operating as a cohesive coalition, this shifting contingent was nevertheless responsible for a series of street protests, political campaigns and legal challenges over subsequent years. Much of this opposition was linked to the cost and scale of the project and to the nature of its implementation. Financed through a US$1.6 billion soft loan from China, the project was critiqued by many as a costly and unnecessary undertaking, particularly given widespread evidence of underinvestment in areas of health and education in the city. The 27-kilometre route was carved through some of the most densely populated areas of Lahore, and the line’s construction required the destruction of small commercial centres and neighbourhoods, displacing thousands of residents. Poor standards of occupational safety resulted in the deaths of at least 50 workers during the five years of construction. Many were migrant labourers, living and working in precarious conditions.1 Critics also seized on the proximity of the line’s path to several historic sites, from the seventeenth-century paradise garden at Shalamar Bagh to the monumental Mughal gateway Chauburji. Concerns with how official permission was secured to enable construction so close to legally protected built heritage led to a suspension of construction in August 2016, ordered by the Lahore High Court but eventually overturned (with some small concessions) by Pakistan’s Supreme Court in late 2017.
At the heart of civil society opposition to the Orange Line project was a deep unease with the Punjab government’s relentless pursuit of development, particularly as overseen by the popular centre-right political party in the province, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and its then-Chief Minister, Shehbaz Sharif. The petition which secured the High Court’s order of suspension characterised the Orange Line as a ‘white elephant’ pursued for ‘cheap publicity’, a prestige object for the ruling party rather than something genuinely needed by Lahore’s residents. Highly visible megaprojects like the Orange Line have been framed plainly by many activists as threats to the city of Lahore – its historic identity, its ways of life and its distinctiveness as an urban centre. The viaduct represented a dramatic example of what some viewed as the ‘Dubai-fication’ of Lahore: the creation of an anonymised, generic space of glass, steel and concrete, following a Gulf model for prosperity rather than something ‘appropriate’ to Lahore’s proud local culture and centuries-old history.
This brand of critique deploys a narrative that will be familiar across a range of twenty-first century urban contexts: neoliberal development, in the shape of large-scale infrastructure projects and associated speculation and commercialisation, is destroying local ways of navigating, knowing and inhabiting a city. But this narrative has its own risks. In framing development as an external imposition following a ‘foreign’ logic of neoliberalism, it can flatten our understanding of the ‘local’, failing to account for the variations in class, ideology and historical experience that shape individual lives in a city. Large-scale projects do, of course, have substantial (and, often, irreversible) impacts, and there does appear to be a shift in the manner and speed in which such developments are taking place. But the ways in which these changes are felt and understood can differ vastly between urban constituencies. They are also frequently contradictory. Many of those dispossessed and displaced by the construction of the Orange Line, for instance, opposed the project entirely. But some readily agreed to leave their homes in the hope that they would resettle in more upwardly mobile neighbourhoods elsewhere in the city. Other affected residents embraced the building of a new mass transit line, but simply wished for their voices to be included in project design and implementation.
Another risk of this narrative is its commitment to an ‘authentic’ Lahore that must be rescued from braying bulldozers and the vulgar aspirations of careerist politicians. The impact of unregulated expansion on the city’s environment – from polluted waterways to shrinking tree coverage to air pollution – certainly demands critical attention. But these processes are not merely symptoms of our neoliberal present. They are in fact constitutive of Lahore’s longer history as an urban space, and certainly since its establishment as the colonial capital of British Punjab in 1849 sparked a population and building boom that continues to this day.4 Earlier rulers had invested lavishly in the city, in particular during the Mughal period (1524–1725) which saw the establishment of many of Lahore’s historic landmarks. But it was in the British period that Lahore started expanding confidently beyond its millennia-old historic centre, the Walled City, absorbing the land and older villages around it. In the 1939 essay Lahore ka Jughrafiya (‘Lahore’s Geography’), the Urdu writer Patras Bokhari joked that ‘once Lahore had surrounding areas, now it is Lahore that surrounds Lahore’.5 In documents from 1941, the Lahore Improvement Trust – a colonial institution founded in 1936 to coordinate urban development – was already noting the ‘extensive purchases of land in the areas surrounding the centre of Lahore’ during the 1920s and 1930s, by residents who hoped to profit from the increase in land values brought about by municipal improvements.6 Change is a quality of urban life. Rather than lamenting a city ‘lost’ through change, it is important to interrogate the different ways change takes place, the inequalities that determine who gains and who suffers, and the political ideas and public imaginaries that frame and mediate interventions into the urban environment.
Lahore in Motion is an attempt to grapple with complexity and contradiction in Lahore’s urban landscape. It does so in a way that is intention- ally multi-vocal; that jumps back and forth across time; that is open to tangents, fragments and impressions as opposed to authoritative statements and comprehensive accounts. We approach the city as a forum of frictions, and the richly generative quality of the Orange Line justifies this concern. In her 2004 ethnography of Indonesia’s rainforests, the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that capitalist desires for connectivity – the unimpeded flow of goods, ideas and people – ‘come to life in “friction”, the grip of worldly encounter’. For Tsing, ‘friction’ describes those awkward, unstable and creative outcomes produced by attempts to forge links across distance and difference. They might be destructive, they may provoke resistance, but they might also enable new social formations and alter conditions of political or economic possibility.
The chapters in Lahore in Motion trace the Orange Line’s work of connection and the ways this infrastructural project has been awkwardly, unstably and creatively incorporated into the city. Our contributors include academics, artists, activists, architects and more. Some have lived in Lahore for decades, others have made it a home more recently, while several consider it their home but no longer live there. All possess a strong affinity with the city and a deep interest in studying and understanding its histories, politics and everyday transformations. Each contributor was assigned one of the Orange Line’s 26 stations and asked to spend time in their respective area, to walk around the station’s environs, to speak to people and to note their own thoughts, concerns and associations. Rather than a conventional academic account of infra- structural development in a postcolonial city, our aim was to create a collaborative portrait of how change is experienced and felt, and how larger historical events, government policies and the politics of class, caste, gender and ethnicity become entangled with personal memories and everyday processes of place-making. Contributors were urged to resist the familiar framing of the Orange Line as an imposed obstruction and to avoid making judgements around ‘(in)authenticity’ in the city.
Many were open to this challenge; others felt compelled to push back against our exhortations and to defend a particular vision of Lahore. The volume thus reflects the fragmentation that characterises contemporary urban life. As editors, our approach recognised that belonging to and inhabiting Lahore entails traversing familiarity and unease, safety and risk, connection and disconnection.
While our work is grounded in Pakistan, it responds to a wider literature on urban life compiled by historians, anthropologists and geographers, in both the Global South and North. The volume is an experiment in how accounts of the contemporary city might profitably stage difference and contestation. We make no claim to provide a ‘representative’ sample of Lahore’s residents in these pages and are keenly aware of the contingent circumstances that brought this collection of (mostly middle class, mostly cosmopolitan, and primarily academic) contributors together, as well as the limitations this poses. Our aim is rather to model an approach for seeing and writing about the city, one that is simultaneously illuminating and inconclusive, one that grapples with friction in order to understand why urban spaces are so productive for thinking about history, identity, politics and belonging in the modern world.
About the Editors
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.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of Lahore in Motion.
Image credit: Orange Line Metro Train, Chauburji Station, Lahore by Shahzaib Damn Cruze, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons