Islamabad

Islamabad is a bower without a bird. When Pakistan built its capital from scratch in the 1960s—designed by Constantinos Doxiadis with gardens by Edward Durell Stone—the plan explicitly capped the city at 2.5 million residents. Real life would happen elsewhere. The ancient garrison city of Rawalpindi, 14 kilometers south, would serve as the commercial and industrial twin while Islamabad remained a pristine showcase. That division holds today. Islamabad proper houses 1.2 million in its manicured sectors; Rawalpindi crams 5 million into its organic bazaars. Together the twins form Pakistan's fourth-largest metro at 7 million people, but the capital itself is deliberately incomplete—a bowerbird's display structure rather than a functional nest. Wikipedia emphasizes Islamabad's planned grid and Margalla Hills backdrop; what it undersells is that the city was designed to project modernity while outsourcing vitality. CPEC was meant to change this, routing China's Belt and Road through Islamabad's orbit, but the flagship ML-1 railway upgrade was withheld by Beijing in 2025. Instead of transformation, the capital received $8.5 billion in smaller agreements across agriculture and electric vehicles. The biological parallel is niche construction taken to extremes: rather than adapting to environment, Pakistan fabricated an entirely artificial ecosystem for governance, deliberately sterile to prevent the organic growth that might challenge the capital's symbolic purpose. Brasília and Canberra attempted similar projects; all three demonstrate that designed capitals often become administrative shells while older cities remain the true centers of national life.