Unsettling a sanitary enclave: malaria at Mian Mir (1849–1910).

The military cantonment of Mian Mir was planned and built in the 1850s about six miles outside the urban area of Lahore as an ordered and sanitary environment for officers and troops – away from the presumed miasmas and unhealthiness of the old city. Yet not long after, a complex interplay of existing and emergent socio-material ecologies, particularly linked to canal irrigation, ensured that malaria became a defining feature of life at Mian Mir. This paper examines the evolving relationships of colonial planning and development, ecological change, and medical knowledge, showing how malaria and mosquitoes unsettled the dominant aesthetics of urban space and landscape, linked to frameworks of sanitation and improvement. It shows how aspirations for spatial order, environmental healthiness, and racial segregation, central to the regimes of colonial sanitary planning and hygienic modernity, were contoured and reconfigured in materially situated ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]