Book Launch: Lahore in Motion

The volume’s editors Ammara Maqsood (UCL), Chris Moffat (QM) and Fizzah Sajjad (LSE) will be joined by Majed Akhter (KCL) and Kasia Paprocki (LSE).

All welcome. Please register to attend at https://ucl-cssa-lahore-in-motion.eventbrite.co.uk

This event has been organised by the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, with additional support from UCL Press and UCL Anthropology. 

About the book

 Lahore in Motion: Infrastructure, History and Belonging in Urban Pakistan 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. The volume collects stories from a series of walks along the metro’s 27-kilometre path, bringing together twenty-seven different authors – including academics and activists, architects and artists – to reflect on the relationship between urban change and belonging in a historic city.

Each chapter is organised around a particular station on the metro, but the volume moves far beyond the neighbourhoods shadowed by the train’s elevated track. Contributors navigate the friction generated by the Orange Line’s construction and reflect on how this project of connection both responds to and produces fragmentation in the urban environment. The book brings together critical insights on the politics of infrastructure in South Asia and the desires and dispossessions fuelling projects of development in the Global South, assessing how they unevenly inflect the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world’s most populous cities.

The book will be released mid-February and available open access via UCL Press.

About the Speakers

• Ammara Maqsood is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at University College London. 
• Chris Moffat is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary University of London.
• Kasia Paprocki is Associate Professor in Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. 
• Fizzah Sajjad in an urban planner and geographer with research positions at the London School of Economics and the Lahore University of Management Sciences. 
• Majed Akhter is Senior Lecturer in Geography at King’s College London.