Lahore After the Modern: Architecture, Equality and Community in Yasmeen Lari's Anguri Bagh.

The problem of home was, in a sense, the founding problem of Pakistan: first, in the call for a new 'homeland' for South Asia's Muslims, but also because its creation provoked displacement and a condition of homelessness. The population transfers and refugee camps that accompanied the 1947 partition of India were succeeded by housing crises prompted by industrialisation and urbanization. Debates over the responsibility of government authorities to address housing inequalities animated politics in Pakistan's early decades, intersecting with global discourses around postcolonial development. This article approaches this history through one low-income housing scheme in Lahore. Designed in the 1970s by Yasmeen Lari, Anguri Bagh was constructed to provide improved accommodation to residents of an informal settlement. But it also sought to facilitate a sense of community and belonging by enlisting residents in the design process and channelling forms and rhythms familiar from local history. Anguri Bagh's successes and failures provide critical insights into the relationship between design and equality in this historical moment, shaped by a faltering faith in modernism and the recuperative gestures of postcolonial culture. The article approaches the architect as an overlooked figure in intellectual history and architecture as a vital space for thinking about inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]