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By Shahab Omer
n a speech to Parliament in 2016, current Prime Minister and then opposition member Imran Khan defended his ownership of a flat in London. This was the height of the panama papers, and under discussion were the different flats and apartments that then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif did or did not own. During the speech, Imran Khan mentioned an anecdote in which when he had bought his own London flat back in the 1990s, he had told Mian Nawaz about it at a social gathering. Curious about it, Mian Nawaz asked what a penthouse was, and Khan diligently explained that it was the top floor flat of a building. To this, Mian Nawaz quite earnestly asked what Imran Khan would do if there was a tornado and the top flat was blown away in it.
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The little story received bipartisan peels of laughter from the house, but what it also did was say something about the Lahori obsession with owning land, and the resultant aversion to apartments and vertical growth. Karachi is still the largest city in Pakistan, but by some measures, the greater Lahore metropolitan area may now be almost equal in size, if not already somewhat larger. Yet for most of its history, Lahore’s residents have shunned the notion of vertical expansion of their city’s size, which is why it is difficult to find apartments in the city. This has largely been attributed to the ‘Punjabi mindset’ of wanting to own the land beneath your feet. And while this has been a seemingly reasonable cultural explanation for a long time, another explanation is that up until now, Lahoris probably never needed to depend on apartment living. With a smaller population and no need for a massive workforce, Lahore has been a metropolis that has largely maintained in its residential areas either cramped but flat enclaves, or large suburban living conditions in its more posh areas. But as the city expands rapidly, Lahoris are going to have to get used to apartment living. In recent years, however, there has been a move towards
