Abstract
The book is one of the few recent monographs on the current and historical state of the town planning profession in Pakistan. The author is a well-known senior scholar and planning practitioner with more than 50 years of international experience in academic research, teaching and professional town planning practice. Dr Anis Ur Rehman is also among first generation of Pakistani town planners, who watched the early steps of the newly established profession and were its strong promoters and practitioners across the federal and provincial governments.
Through this book, Dr Anis aims to put forth a historical account of the milestones as the profession brought recognition and opportunities for town planners in the country. As a result, a major chunk of information and content of this book comes from the author’s personal knowledge of events and personalities, which are used to evaluate the potential and shortcomings of planning practices, and of course, of the town planners of Pakistan.
The book comprises 13 chapters. Chapter I is a lengthy description of prehistoric settlements and excavated remains discovered in present-day Pakistan. Chapter II is rather short and summarizes the salient attributes of town planning, including its continuous and contextual nature, and futuristic stance. It then briefly lists its composites or components, that is, legislation, institutions, professionals and decision-making system, which form the later chapters of the book. However, this chapter ignores the theoretical literature on planning concepts and introduces the author’s own planning concepts: human ecosystems and their socio-physical environment including people, places and resources.
Chapter III talks about three kinds of planning: for the people, by the people and with the people. Planning for people is described as a top-down process and planning with the people includes advocacy planning and participation by the public in decision making. The third type, planning by the people, is about the self-developed slums and squatter settlements. The author concludes that the contextual situation decides what type of planning is more appropriate in a given situation.
Chapter IV summarizes various, if not all, legislative tools available to urban planners in the country. Chapter V talks about major planning institutions of Pakistan, including those who undertake physical planning and those in education and research. Chapter VI categorizes planners into various groups, largely based on the author’s opinions where he includes historic and spiritual figures at the top of the list and also various government officials and civil activists as ‘innovators’. This categorization deserved to go beyond ‘who is who’ into a thorough discussion on the role played by these groups in establishing the planning profession in Pakistan.
Chapter VII summarizes national plans and visions. Linking the implementation of these plans with political instability, the author suggests that democratic leaders probably could not give attention to the town planning profession. The author faults political leadership and their shorter term vision for this which he notes could probably have been due to their relatively shorter duration in office.
Chapter VIII deals with the national and sub-national level spatial strategies and plans. The next three chapters detail the examples of three types of planning presented in the second chapter. These chapters are the real strength of this book and present a sound knowledge and evaluation of these planning instruments. Chapter XII, on the physical environment in urban areas, focuses largely on solid waste and air pollution in cities while it ignores other negative aspects including slums, lack of urban parks, playgrounds and limited mobility infrastructure. This chapter categorizes noise and vibration pollution as ‘moderate’ without much evidence.
The ‘Epilogue’, in Chapter XIII, is perhaps the most interesting section of the book. It provides a good amount of evaluative knowledge about socio-cultural, administrative and policy aspects of the country’s town planning practices. However, the author discusses a ‘dearth of planners’ in the country, without mentioning that there is a significant demand for them. Similarly, the author could have described a growing interest in development professions, the rising number of student enrolments and the changing quality of knowledge and skills of graduates.
Unfortunately, the majority of data cited in this book comes from the desk research of various websites. At places, it becomes a bit disturbing where the author refers to Wikipedia pages and scribd.com documents in footnotes, even for official documents and published material which could easily be traced by desk research. This pattern dilutes the argument and decreases the chances of an extensive bibliography and the foreign reader is forced to think about the accuracy of the statements.
Presentation is, perhaps, not the top strength of this book. Figure quality is usually poor, and their text is mostly unreadable. Referencing style in the book is poor at places. For example, the author refers to ‘Table 2, Chapter VI’ without mentioning page number, and the headings do not say which chapter they are from, nor do the page numbers show it. A reader must navigate through a monotonous numbering system of headings and hope to somehow land at the desired place or revert to the list of tables for finding the relevant page number, which is, to my disappointment, not provided at all. There are a few proof reading and typographic mistakes. For example, the author notes that ‘Punjab is the most populous and urbanised province of Pakistan….’ on pages xiii and 220; this is factually incorrect. Punjab is and has been the second most urbanized province, after Sindh (Government of Pakistan [GoP], 2021). Similarly, on page 320, the book notes that Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency was enacted in 2097, instead of 1997.
The chapters deserved an improved analysis of the data presented in the book which would help strengthen its arguments. For example, from the list of town planners, one can easily count the number of male and female town planners from their names to reinforce the argument about lack of female participation in the profession after graduation, which usually requires an active registration with the Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners (PCATP). However, the problem identified exists across various disciplines and is particularly acute in the medical and engineering professions. The book could have highlighted a gradually increasing visibility of women in the field of urban planning by referring to the wider national policies where females are encouraged to apply and sometimes even have reserved seats.
By usually relying on personal experience and desk-based research, the author certainly lost an opportunity for an insightful qualitative study of the topic. By interviewing and quoting senior experts from his extensive peer network and personal data records, the author could have connected the individual landmarks in the country’s town planning history in a chain of events. Further, one would have liked to read about why something happened, what were the circumstances which led to the event, rather than a mere description of the event and a short ‘cursory’ evaluation text at the end, as the author often uses this term throughout the book.
In the Appendix section, almost half the appendices are not fully relevant or are basic information. Similarly, the list of registered planners has been shared from the 2014 data set, while publishing in 2017. The book could have provided more insights on the evolution of town planning through research studies and development projects in the past decade. The work misses mention and assessment of a few important references, including ‘Town Planning in the Third World Countries’ (Bhatti, 1994) and the ‘National Reference Manual on Planning and Infrastructure Standards’ (GoP, 1986).
The sub-title with specific reference to Punjab is perhaps an understatement. The book covers various national projects and developments from outside Punjab as well. This makes it a neither here nor there kind of text spread to the central and southern areas. This also limits the author from discussing the intricacies of town planning in the northern half of the country.
In sum, this book may be a good introduction to the topic for a general reader and first-year students of urban planning. However, for a practising professional, university academic or an advanced student, this provides limited value because of its limited depth, lack of rigorous research work and a narrative account of events, which are often filled with subjective opinions rather than hard evidence.
Nevertheless, full credit to the current effort, which is indeed very thought-provoking and inspires its readers to go further ahead on the topic in a country where the history and growth of a profession are seldom documented. We would love to see a second edition of this book that would be more focused, would use more data, use interviews, refer to personal or national archives and most importantly would relate the country’s context with the latest knowledge about the development of the profession. A few chapters could be removed while others would have to be expanded, and the question of why things have happened would have to be answered along with the description of events and their ‘cursory’ reviews and evaluations. Also, perhaps because of this gigantic task in a fuzzy information scenario, a co-authored or edited work would thrive with inputs from other authors and would surely increase the value of this work beyond its current reach.