Place · planned national capital · Pakistan
Islamabad
/ɪsˈlɑːmɑːbɑːd/
Also known as Islāmābād, Islamabad Capital Territory, ICT
Islamabad is Pakistan's capital, a planned city laid out in the 1960s at the foot of the Margalla Hills and established in 1967 to replace Karachi. The Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis drew its triangular grid of sectors, and legislators held it up as Pakistan's answer to Chandigarh. It stands on very old ground: the Soan terraces of the Pothohar plateau have yielded early Stone Age tools, and a Buddhist stupa of the 2nd to 4th centuries CE was excavated near Shah Allah Ditta in 2015–16.
- Date
- 1967–None
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.693, 73.064
Worth knowing
Government did not move straight from Karachi: it worked from neighbouring Rawalpindi in the early 1960s until Islamabad's essential works were finished in 1966, and the two cities now form one conurbation known as the Twin Cities.
About the place
Placed at the city coordinates given on the Wikipedia article.
Connections (7)
- Site withinFaisal Mosque, Islamabad
The Faisal Mosque stands at the foot of the Margalla Hills on the north-western side of Islamabad, about five kilometres from the city centre, and Wikipedia's account of the capital names it the country's flagship mosque and the first of the city's landmarks. Designed by Vedat Dalokay in 1969 and completed in 1986 with Saudi funding, it is the building through which the planned capital is usually pictured, and it is among the sights pointed out from the Daman-e-Koh viewpoint above the city.
- Successor capital ofKarachi
Karachi was Pakistan's provisional capital at independence in 1947. In 1958 a commission was set up to find a site near Rawalpindi, and in 1959 it chose the area north-east of that city: Karachi lay at the country's southern edge, business interests there were felt to press on government, and the new site was closer to army headquarters and to Kashmir. Government moved first to Rawalpindi in the early 1960s and then to Islamabad once its essential works were finished in 1966.
- AnalogueChandigarh
Islamabad and Chandigarh are the two planned capitals that the partition of Punjab produced on either side of the new border. Pakistani legislators touted Islamabad as their counterpart to Chandigarh, whose modernism they envied, and Wikipedia notes conceptual similarities between the two. Islamabad's master plan came from the Greek firm of Constantinos Doxiadis, a triangular grid of sectors with its apex towards the Margalla Hills; Chandigarh's came from Le Corbusier, for an Indian Punjab that had lost Lahore.
- Site adjacencyTakshashila / Taxila
Taxila lies north-west of Islamabad, listed in Wikipedia's account of the capital's surroundings alongside Wah Cantt and Attock, and Golra Sharif, inside the Islamabad Capital Territory, is about 17 kilometres from the ancient city. The capital shares Taxila's Gandharan Buddhist past: in 2015–16 the Federal Department of Archaeology excavated a Buddhist stupa of the 2nd to 4th centuries CE at Ban Faqiran, near the Shah Allah Ditta caves inside Islamabad's own territory.
- Site withinSaidpur, Islamabad
Saidpur is a village and union council in a ravine of the Margalla Hills inside the Islamabad Capital Territory, beside the Daman-e-Koh overlook. The planned capital grew up around it, and from 2006 the Capital Development Authority spent 400 million rupees remodelling it as an arts and crafts village, refurbishing its mud houses, cleaning its stream and opening a museum of old photographs of Islamabad, so that a sixteenth-century settlement became one of the modern city's main heritage sights.
- Site withinPakistan Monument, Islamabad
The Pakistan Monument stands on the western part of the Shakarparian hills in Islamabad, near the Zero Point interchange, in parkland created for the new capital in 1960–61 after Gakhar settlers were relocated. Its height makes it visible across the Islamabad–Rawalpindi area, and a viewing platform at the end of its Freedom Plaza gives a bird's-eye view of the city. The Shakarparian parade ground hosts the Pakistan Day parade every 23 March, the date on which the monument was inaugurated in 2007.
- Contemporary capital withJatiya Sangsad Bhaban
After seizing power in a military coup, Ayub Khan declared Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, the country's second capital and decided to build the National Assembly there, hoping a modern legislative complex would placate the eastern wing. In the same years a commission chose the site of Islamabad, and the new administrative capital rose below the Margalla Hills. The Dhaka assembly, begun in 1964, was halted by the war of 1971 and completed in 1982 as the parliament of Bangladesh.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Islamabad", "Faisal Mosque", "Saidpur, Islamabad", "Daman-e-Koh".
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