ABSTRACT
High-modernist state projects like Islamabad, James Scott has observed, are ‘always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognise, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain’ (Scott 1998: 310). In some cases, however, such projects are overcome by informal processes to the extent that they try to supersede them. I will argue that such is the case in Islamabad. Like the physical planning of the city, the initial organisation of governing institutions in Islamabad baldly manifested the new military government’s programme to promote the civil and military bureaucracies at the expense of wider political participation. Since the early 1960s, civic groups have made weak and episodic efforts to establish representative government in the city. However, without exaggerating the unity of state bureaucracies (Abrams 1988, Li 2005), it is fair to say that Islamabad has remained formally under the complete planning and administrative control of the civil bureaucracy — even during the period of representative governments from 1988 to 1999.
