Domestication of privacy through the governance of informal production of space in postcolonial Lahore

Abstract

Postcolonial Lahore is a site of contestation among conflicting productions of privacies. This research explores the material and representational dynamics of this contestation by examining how this domestication is shaped by colonial and postcolonial strategies of spatial governance, segmenting space along the mutually exclusive lines of public and private, and the ways in which they are resisted through everyday practices of informal appropriation. Departing from the post-structural critique of such ontological binarism, this research argues that while in abstraction, public and private are seen as mutually exclusive binaries, in reality, their relationship is highly varied and always in a state of becoming. A case study analysis of the historical development of five urban settlements in Lahore, along with a detailed literature review and fieldwork, unravels how the construction of boundaries between public and private are intertwined with the control and organization of domestic space. It also studies how formal and informal emerge as the conceptual categories of spatial planning in Lahore within the historical production of middle-class residential spaces. In addition to the legal planning instruments, this thesis highlights that informality as a spatial category is constructed through the exclusionary production of an urban built environment, where any divergences from material and discursive coding of public and private segmentation are considered informal. Countering any simplistic opposition between formal/informal, this research suggests that in everyday urban space, informality occurs as both defending as well as transgressing of the institutional and non-institutional assertion of boundaries. It highlights that the social and cultural divisions in the city are reproduced spatially in the ways the rigid boundaries between public and private are maintained and the degree to which they are resisted. By foregrounding how such definitive architectural geometries are continually transgressed and appropriated, this research reveals the limitations of binary classifications in articulating the differences and multiplicities of how spatial privacies are made and unmade in everyday practice.