A CITY WITHIN A CITY

The Lahore Metropolitan area covers 2, 300 square kilometers, of which the Walled City of Lahore occupies a 2.5 square kilometer stretch of the dense structure. Within its thirteen gates, the city accommodates more than 22, 000 buildings and has offered shelter and employment for closely fifteen percent of the metropolitan population (Rab 1998). In the recent years, Lahore has begun to surge inexorably southwards.

The Walled City of Lahore is situated in the north-western quarter of Pakistan’s second-largest city, Lahore, which is the provincial and cultural capital of Punjab. The Walled City is locally referred to as the Androon Shehr or the Inner City, as it represents the nucleus from where the metropolitan city originated during the 11th century and expanded.

A barricade no longer contains the Walled City, but an imaginary periphery still signifies a primordial sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.