The Intractable Garden: Improvement and Unruliness in Lahore’s Landscapes

Nida Rehman delivered an insightful and thought-provoking talk titled “The Intractable Garden: Improvement and Unruliness in Lahore Landscapes” at the Climate Congress. The talk was attended by more than 140 attendees at the Lahore Museum Auditorium. Her discussion highlighted the deep interconnections between Lahore’s colonial past, its environmental degradation, and the contemporary urban challenges caused by unchecked development and climate change.

Nida began by addressing Lahore’s current environmental crisis such as air and water pollution. She emphasized that these vulnerabilities are socially mediated, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. To fully understand Lahore’s environmental challenges today, She argued, one must examine its colonial history and the transformation of landscapes under imperial rule. She explored how colonial interventions, such as canal building and agrarian restructuring, reshaped Lahore’s urban and rural territories. This transformation was not merely economic but deeply ideological, rooted in the colonial imperative to control and discipline nature while erasing existing local practices.

An example Nida highlighted was the Punjab Agri-Horticulture Society’s experiments in Lahore’s gardens during the mid-19th century. These efforts reflected colonial anxieties about soil quality, salinity, and drainage, presenting nature as unruly and wasteful—yet improvable through European knowledge. This ideology often marginalized traditional users of the land, such as dhobis (cloth washers), whose workspaces were cleared under the pretext of sanitation. Nida argued that such exclusions demonstrate how improvement projects operated as tools of segregation, erasing communal practices and reinforcing caste hierarchies.

Nida concluded by connecting these historical processes to contemporary urbanization, particularly the Ravi Urban Development Authority project. She critiqued this project as a modern iteration of colonial “improvement,” driven by economic agendas and greenwashed sustainability claims. Dispossession, environmental degradation, and exclusion persist under the guise of progress, repeating historical patterns.