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The Lawrence and Montgomery Halls in the Punjab Agri-Horticultural Society (Lawrence) Garden. Photograph by George Craddock, 1870. © British Library Board, Photo 50/1(100).
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This article explores plants, seeds, soils, and other nonhuman actors as archival and architectural agents within the history of Lahore's urban landscape, as seen from the ground. It traces the halting efforts of the Agri-Horticultural Society of Punjab to enact regional improvement through the development of agricultural and botanical expertise at...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... Managed by an En glish su per in ten dent, the new gar den treated vis i tors to sea sonal blooms of lo cal and imported flowering plants, bi weekly per for mances at its band stand drew large crowds, and the Lawrence and Montgomery Halls built on the grounds housed en tertain ment and ban quet fa cil i ties for the co lo nial and na tive elite ( fig. 3). 40 With me tic u lously la beled dis plays of imported and lo cal spe cies; well-attended and reg ular fruit, veg e ta ble, and flower shows; and ac tive nurser ies, it pro vided seeds and plants, as well as prac ti cal knowl edge and en cour age ment to Lahore's am a teur horticulturalists and lo cal malis (gar den ers). Indeed, the ...
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The evolutionary process of what is now known as Nigeria began to come under British control in 1861 and was made a British colony in 1914.
Citations
... Managed centrally by a consortium of government departments and overseen closely by the Chief Minister of Punjab-but reliant on the labour of hundreds of field-based vector control workers-this system of disease surveillance formed a critical component of the Punjab Government's dengue control programme and was widely hailed by national and international media as an innovative solution to dengue control (Ahmed 2013;Sharma 2014;Smith 2014). 1 With dengue's apparent decline, Lahore, which was the epicentre of the 2011 outbreak and subsequent focus of the provincial government's interventions, came to be seen as a model for public health management in the country (Sherdil et al. 2012). 2 Despite these ostensible initial successes, over the coming years Aedes mosquitoes continued to take advantage of Lahore's complicated urban waterscape. Lahore has long been associated with forms of cultivated nature-a legacy not only of Sultanate and Mughal landscape history, but also of efforts to build gardens and canals, and boost agricultural productivity in Punjab, under British colonial rule in the late 19 th century (Arnold 2005;Rehman 2014Rehman , 2020aWescoat 1996). However, such "improvements" also ushered drainage problems and malarial mosquitoes to the region's flat terrain (Bynum 1994;Klein 2001;Whitcombe 1995). ...
In 2011, an outbreak of dengue fever struck the most urbanised districts of Punjab. After an initially slow response, the Punjab Government set up a digital disease surveillance system which was soon hailed as a model for epidemic control and public health governance. Despite these successes, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have continued to take advantage of the micro‐ecologies of Lahore’s urban landscape—in part because of the fragmented and uneven socio‐spatial dynamics of water access, storage, and use. This paper brings into conversation, and in tension, these different infrastructural dimensions of dengue, namely the celebrated system of vector surveillance and the fractured infrastructures of water, within a single frame of “epidemic infrastructures”. It conceptualises the long‐standing unevenness of Lahore’s water systems as “infrastructures of transmission” and techno‐managerial systems of control as “infrastructures of problematisation”. The paper uses the lens of heterogeneity to bring together different components of these systems and explore their intersecting effects. I show how the transmission of dengue paradoxically follows both the scarcity and abundance of water use in the city. Yet these socio‐ecological complexities are bypassed in the technical matrices to visualise, enumerate, and emplace vectors, which also provide the means to narrativise state successes. I argue that epidemic infrastructures work together to reinforce individualised responsibilities for infrastructural maintenance and urban health to residents and workers.
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.
