From Muslim Colony to Shakarparian, Islamabad’s bulldozers have moved with ruthless efficiency—flattening homes, uprooting trees, and erasing World War I memorials and a Mughal-era mosque in a single sweep—revealing a city where people, nature, and history are all deemed expendable before the altar of capital-led development.
Islamabad is being redesigned as an elite enclave where infrastructure serves capital rather than citizens—and where “development” functions as a legal instrument to erase the working class, nature, and history. The city is increasingly stitched together by highways connecting elite zones: from the airport to Blue Area, the Red Zone to Barakahu, and onward toward Rawat, DHA, and Bahria Town. Meanwhile, the people who build, clean, and service the capital are steadily pushed out of sight.
This transformation is celebrated as a development model. In reality, it follows a familiar urban script: housing societies masquerading as housing policy; roads replacing public transport; malls and private hospitals substituting for public welfare. These are not instruments of inclusion but mechanisms of exclusion. Islamabad’s transformation is not the result of administrative failure—it is a class project. Land is converted into exchange value for developers, investors, and rentiers, while workers are rendered surplus.
Much of Islamabad’s new real estate remains unoccupied, driven by speculative capital rather than urban need. For the working class, the only visible outcomes are rising rents and shrinking living space.
Developers have even demolished a British-era World War I monument, a move that reflects a blatant disregard for Islamabad’s cultural and historical heritage. Such landmarks are not mere stones; they anchor the city’s present in the narratives of its past and give depth to the federal capital’s identity.
Simultaneously, Islamabad’s natural fabric is being stripped away. Large-scale tree-cutting drives—particularly along the H-8 Expressway and the Margalla Enclave Link Road—have destroyed an estimated 15 to 20 hectares of urban green cover. This is not just environmental damage; it is an assault on the city’s ecological health and aesthetic character.
At the centre of this transformation stands the Capital Development Authority (CDA). Unlike provincial cities governed by elected local bodies, Islamabad’s most powerful civic institution is neither elected nor meaningfully accountable to residents. While MNAs nominally represent the capital, real authority over land use, demolitions, and planning rests with the CDA. The repeated postponement of local government elections has further hollowed out democratic oversight, enabling selective legality: elite encroachments are normalised—even regularised—while informal settlements are criminalised and erased in the name of order.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the systematic demolition of katchi abadis. Since 2015, more than 50 informal settlements have been bulldozed across Islamabad, often without resettlement or tenure security. The I-11 katchi abadi remains the most notorious case—razed despite a Supreme Court stay order and explicit instructions that evictions proceed only with viable housing plans for low-income residents. A decade later, the pattern continues with impunity.
More recently, the decades-old Muslim Colony in Noor Pur Shahan—home to around 30,000 people—was demolished despite legal challenges, leaving thousands homeless in winter without alternatives. Dhobi Ghat Basti near Abpara met a similar fate. These are not isolated incidents but policy outcomes. Eviction has become the city’s default response to poverty.
This exclusionary violence extends beyond the loss of shelter. When residents of informal settlements are denied NADRA address registration, they are stripped of legal existence. Access to education, healthcare, banking, and voting is curtailed through bureaucratic erasure. Even death has become class-divided: burial rights in Islamabad are increasingly regulated along socioeconomic lines, determining where—or whether—the poor may bury their dead. The city does not merely remove homes; it erases citizenship.
Exclusion also permeates everyday livelihoods. Islamabad faces a chronic shortage of affordable student hostels, forcing many—especially women—into precarious living arrangements routinely disrupted by CDA raids under zoning regulations. Food vendors are criminalised, their carts confiscated, despite court rulings recognising street vending as a legitimate livelihood. Gig workers—riders, drivers, delivery personnel—remain invisible in urban planning yet are acutely vulnerable to protest-era internet shutdowns that slash their incomes.
The demolition of Islamabad’s dhabas has further stripped the working class of affordable meals, forcing them into expensive restaurants. The state offers no alternatives, while cheap eateries quietly persist in elite enclaves—a telling irony in the capital city.
In Islamabad, informality is treated as illegality only when it belongs to the poor. The contrast with elite privilege is stark. While katchi abadis, old villages, and informal livelihoods face relentless demolition drives, powerful real estate developers operate with near-total impunity. Illegal housing schemes expand unchecked, commercial plazas mushroom along the Margalla foothills, and institutional housing societies—originally meant for employees—are converted into speculative assets.
The CDA does not merely lack accountability; it performs its function as a technocratic arm of the state that enforces property relations favourable to capital while disciplining labour through spatial exclusion. Planning law is not applied equally—it is wielded selectively.
This imbalance reflects deeper housing policy failures. Islamabad’s population has nearly quadrupled in two decades, yet successive governments and the CDA have consistently neglected low-income housing. With Pakistan’s acute housing shortage and rising displacement, a growing share of the population risks being rendered “illegal” simply for needing shelter. A city that refuses to plan for its workers ultimately criminalises them.
Islamabad’s working class did not arrive uninvited. They migrated—like others before them—in search of livelihoods, education, and survival. They built the roads, cleaned the offices, staffed the hospitals, delivered the food, and sustained the capital’s daily life. To label them encroachers now is not only inaccurate; it is unjust.
The real question is not whether Islamabad is developing, but for whom. A capital that excludes its workers—the very people who make it function—cannot claim to represent the country it governs. Development that displaces, disenfranchises, and dehumanises is not progress. It is class policy, executed through concrete, bulldozers, and administrative power.
The struggle over Islamabad is ultimately a struggle over the right to the city: between those who own land and those whose labour sustains it.