The quiet, picturesque city built at the Himalayan foothills was once considered among the most sparsely populated towns in the whole country. But with the ever increasing population, one day it was bound to share the burden of this growth with other cities.

First it was dealing only with the ‘greatness thrust upon’ it by the CDA along with the ‘expertise’ provided by the Punjab government in the background in the form of metro bus. Now a new affliction has struck the capital.

As per CDA itself 759 fully grown and decades-old trees, 80 per cent of which were paper mulberry, have been cut down as to pave way for the Metro Bus route. That the open spaces been turned into parking lots, is another violation of Islamabad’s master plan.

If one goes on a drive, visits the usual places in Islamabad, one would soon be welcomed by the uninviting and unavoidable long queue of cars choking half of the main roads. The driver can stomp her/his feet on the car floor, can mumble all sorts of profanities, giving insane rather obscene gestures to the fellow car drivers who in their wisdom try to bypass you and bump into you again just a few yards away. You can do it all but will fail to find a decent parking spot in the radius of at least half a km of your desired destination these days.

The reason is simple. If the islooites are not impressed by the fancy metro tracks they can take ‘pleasure’ while looking into miles of deep dug in spaces that once served as parking lots. Do not mistake them for the excavation work under taken by some Egyptologist at the tomb of Tutankhamen. No it is the double storied parking place that is under construction.

As long as I can remember most of the markets and plazas offered a decent parking space to all the visitors and to their customers until recently. But then there was no PML-N government sitting in the federal capital. A party that appears impressed by the Mogul emperors and shares their penchant for erecting humungous architectural marvels rooted in their desire to become immortal through putting brick and lime together.

This inherited taste is indeed beneficial for Pakistanis in some cases but it has proven to be a headache only in this particular case.   The roads are rapidly changing shapes, with no apparent logic behind it.   Let it be clear that no one here is against new construction work but there are parameters, techniques and strategies formed accepted and implemented worldwide to move forward with such plans.

The world could not have moved on from the Neolithic period to Egyptian city plans and from there to Indus civilization later 2600BC. The point again is to analyze the need for the construction of any project, its sustainability and its relation with the cultural life of the area designated for the building purpose.

Were the parking spaces really needed at this point? It surely is a debatable point but if one removes this for the sake of argument, couldn’t there have been a plan devised to not bring the lives of the common man to a standstill while the project is under construction?

Most of the main shopping areas in Islamabad were surely not in any dire need to employ the genius of some Hippodamus. Better management of the already existing parking facilities could have solved the issue for a long time to come. What we need is planning that is purely based on rules more environmentally compatible and envisioned with keeping next many decades in mind instead of uprooting trees every other year. For now Islamabad struggles with losing its calmness and beauty to disastrous CDA ideas aimed at defining ‘development’ in a manner absolutely against the local definition of the word.

Such coarse development projects are but misuse of the available resources and harm to the cultural ways of a city. Where there were small, indigenous parking spaces, there soon shall be only the corporate-style, manufactured and imported parking areas till then islooites can keep peddling around the markets with ‘No Parking’ sign pasted on every possible parking spot.

Geti Ara is a story-teller, journalist and a documentary maker