Date

2022-12-12

Author

Afzal, Natasha

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The capital city of Pakistan, Islamabad was designed in congruence with the prevalent zeitgeist of the 60’s – grid iron plan, functionalist planning, aggressive zoning, vehicular preferences etc. The axial city is defined by differentiated zones that effectively bifurcates the city both functionally and socially and defines territoriality for the urban citizen in an overt, enforced, and top-down administrative manner. The way the urban fabric is envisioned and enforced for the city allows segregation and bifurcations to become the defining face. It forces urban living, social interactions, encounters, aspects of inclusion and exclusion, and the notions of citizenship and membership within the city to be defined by bifurcated lines – by virtue of the form of the city and its control mechanisms for maintaining an idea of how the physical and the social aspects of the city coincide. However, while the city still follows its original zeitgeist, the world has seen some essential shifts in the sixty-two years since its inception. With technological affordances there has been an economic shift from the secondary to the tertiary sector. The ubiquitous nature of wireless technology and digitization has allowed a shift in scale where relations can be managed. These shifts have allowed the creation of new urban digital platforms that mold and orchestrate political, economic, and social interactions. A primary example for a digital urban platform within the urban landscape of Islamabad is Careem – a platform for ride hailing. The platform allows curation and rethinking of social interactions between urban citizens and results in a remaking of the way the urban fabric comes together – both socially and materially. The research posits that the infusion of the platform reality into the urban landscape redefines existing stratified realities and remakes the notion of being an urbanite within the post-industrial Islamabad. It explores the alterations in urban specificities that the platform generates, the new norms and practices are generated that redefine and remake older social practices. The aim of the research is to explore if and how urban citizenship, membership, the notion of the public, and by extension publicness previously defined by the notions of segregation is being redefined by the infusion of the platform logic. It further explores the role of the individuals and the public in the reconstitution of the original linear relationship exhibited through the physical city and social city of Islamabad.

Subject Keywords

Urban Citizenship, membership, agency, platform urbanism, public, publicness, Islamabad.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/101971

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis