HAVING a sense of a place is pretty significant. Briefly put, sense of place refers to a connection between humans and their environment that may go beyond the tangibles. To understand the concept of a sense of a place, ask someone who is stranded on a boat in international waters, ask a person displaced by war, or ask someone who is in a refugee camp post-flood. They all feel lost, don’t they? Well, we may all be feeling that way while still being in our own surroundings.

Let us take the happenings around the Attabad Lake as a test case. The lake, as we know, is on top of what once was Attabad village; a collective memory for a whole lot of people. From a village to a lake, Nature had a few things to do with the transformation. Was it a disaster or an opportunity? That is a debate for some other time, but little do we realise how we are eradicating that collective memory, the sense of place, with the monstrosity of concrete structures.

How long do you think it would take for that 2km stretch to convert into another Naran, or worse, Murree? How long do you think it would take to see the blue water losing its original colour? How long would it take us to realise that opportunistic approach has done damage beyond repair? How long will it take us to realise that this layer of hospitality is eroding the layer of community? Tragically, there is a good chance that we may never realise any such thing at all.

The same is the case elsewhere across the country. With three billion more people expected to be on the planet by 2080, we need additional health, education, administration, recreational and office infrastructure. Expansion in cities means more and rapid infrastructure.

On its own, Pakistan is expected to add 163 million more people to the population by 2050. By 2030, 50 per cent of our population will have moved to the cities. Imagine the urban sprawl and the expanse of housing societies that are and will be even more important than our critical sources of food. To give you a better idea, according to reports, 70pc of the agricultural land of Lahore has been lost to urbanisation or industrial needs.

In this competition of building bigger and faster, we have cities with confused designs, lack of inclusion and relation to its context. Next time you are stuck in the traffic, observe the buildings and spaces around. They look like as if they have been produced in a factory. The disposable nature of the world has affected our approach towards the built environment as well.

Mass production, for example the eerily similar housing units around us, fosters meaningless connections and short-term decisions. Till the 19th century, the average age of a building was considered to be a hundred years minimum, which has been now gone down to 40 years.

Winston Churchill famously said that we, the humans, design buildings and then the buildings design us. This statement is a testament to everything mentioned above; that the physical spaces we create and inhabit have a profound influence on our behaviour, attitudes, and overall wellbeing.

So, what is essentially missing? The buildings of today, result of rapid infrastructure, completely lack empathy and rootedness. Identity and diversity are key components to celebrate a place. Have you ever wondered why there is so much frustration and unapologetic behaviour in society?

Our collective complex of being everything but, God forbid, a Pakistani, is now apparent in our buildings and cities, too. There is an ongoing silent race for creating and designing the most Dubai look-alike building. The land, indigenous people, culture, ecosystem, economics, heritage … there is nothing that can come in the way of the architects or the builders.

Let me reiterate, we are already bearing the consequences of cities that are developed out of context. Against everything that we learn in our architecture discourse, we now see buildings as individualistic structures in an urban fabric.

This lack of cohesion causes a frag- mented urban environment, fostering exclusion and marginalisation, and this is exactly what we see in our society. Such infrastructure disturbs the local character and context of a neighbourhood, leading to a loss of community identity and cohesion.

Consequences, you may ask? We have already disrupted our neighbourhoods. There is no character of the cities that we are expanding uncontrollably. We have many an ‘Attabad’ in the country — scenic natural beauty and landscape with diverse flora and fauna, and, indeed, indigenous communities — but they are all under constant threat as much from blind commercialism as from meaningless obsessions.

As for the Attabad Lake, one wonders how long it will take us to understand that erecting hospitality structures

is not the only way to promote tourism. No, it is not. And how long will it take us to realise that the local people will soon lose that crucial sense of place?

S. Sundas
Rawalpindi

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2023