Speakers
Description
This research identifies and conceptualizes the idea of a ‘Modern Mohalla’ and how it demonstrates intersectionality between formal and informal built environments via a feminist lens of lived experiences and their acts of ‘Mohalla-making’ in post-independence Pakistan. Taking the Government Housing Quarters of sector G-9/2 in Islamabad, Pakistan as the site of study where a Modern Mohalla is observed, this research under an interdisciplinary lens seeks to redress the quantitative approach that existing scholarly work portrays about this intersectionality. It aims to develop a qualitative critical historiographic insight concerning the lived histories of subaltern women in a particular community of Islamabad and their informal communal practices within a modernist environment. This work is a qualitative piece of research that explores the subject of the ‘Modern Mohalla’ in the Government Housing Quarter and its socio-spatial interrelationships by outlining the history of the Mohalla within the broader context of South Asia and linking its impact on the communal structure of Islamabad’s neighbourhoods today. Furthermore, this research aims to decode the relationship between Doxiadis’ theory of Ekistics and whether it serves as a facilitating agency for the feminist Mohalla-making practices. Through a critical ethnographic approach as its research methodology, this research inquiry aims to develop a critical historiographical feminist dialogue that counters the triple absence of women within the design process of Islamabad and the G-9/2 government housing, the existing scholarship concerning feminist spatial practices, and the subject of female lived experiences as archival data. The ethnographic research methodology includes interviews with the women living on site and translating their feminist Mohalla-making practices into drawings. These drawings seek to reveal the historical interrelatedness of feminist communal relationships in a Modern Mohalla of Islamabad that has been unacknowledged for years amidst a socially stratified and patriarchal setup.
| Keywords | Informal ; formal; Mohalla-making practices; intersectionality; feminist spaces |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
