A story of Urban Renewal as told by data

Lahore, Pakistan

By Zara Farooq
lahore, neo-colonization, global capital, social justice, orange metro line

It is a case study project centered around finding ways to make data on Lahore accessible and readable to its residents.

Me and Maha started working on the project by simply mapping the route and stops of the Orange Metro Line. Since there is almost no records or data available for the project this was a long process. This was then merged with creating a photo database of each of the stops of the Metro line.

The next step was to create a record of some of the main neighborhoods along the line. This was then mixed with online property data from zameen.com which later seemed to be insufficient and flawed to create a database of average property values and speculation.

After this we developed the project further to map the areas of conflict or threat. This was initially done by plotting the demolished structures or areas of threat that we knew of.

The map shows shows the project’s initial work as described above.

After this we found a joint area of interest and decided to take that into more focus together.

Since we were part of creating one unified project all along we decided to take the next steps together. After being unsuccessful in using QGIS mapping to trace the path buffers and analyzing map data from OSM, we decided to step back and redesign our project outlook.

The main focus was to create a website with mapping multiple layers of collected data. My initial work on identifying areas of threat and creating clickable news articles hyperlinks in the popups guided me to create a database using news archives. This was a long manual data collection process where all of the article archives from Dawn News were traced and mapped using longitude and Latitude geo-referencing.

This was done together on multiple mediums after which Carto was finalized to be used. The dated references were used in creating animated pops of events in a form of a timeline that were somehow not shown clearly due to some error.

Together with Maha’s detailed work on activism around metro line and mapping the evictions reported by them, the project was created on a holistically detailed level.

The final product website has the all of the narrative, data and further information incorporated in it.