Revised Islamabad master plan approval likely January
By Saad Saud

ISLAMABAD—The revised master plan is likely to be approved within a month and its implementation will start without any delay, Chairman of Capital Development Authority Kamran Lashari said Tuesday.
The changed master plan has taken into account advice and suggestions from high government officials. It will be presented to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz for approval by the federal cabinet. “The inter-ministerial committee comprising four federal ministers has already given its approval to the plan,” Lashari said.
He said the plan comprehensively deals with the current needs and future challenges. It covers all aspects including more housing sectors for the city’s growing population, extension in municipal limits, industrial activities, environment, improvement of roads, development of more recreational spots and safety of existing water reservoirs.
Lashari said the Authority has not proposed inclusion of the Fateh Jang area in Islamabad’s limits in the revised master plan, because the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is more relevant department to make such a proposal as airports are within its jurisdiction and it operates in all provinces. Lashari said the master plan of almost all the major cities at the international level is reviewed after every 25 years and if CDA had followed the same pattern the Islamabad master plan should have been reviewed twice.
Another CDA official said the revised master plan has proposed extending limits of Islamabad to the area adjacent to the motorway, increasing the sectorial series from 16 to 18. The increase in sectoral series will add 12 new residential sectors in the layout plan of the previous master plan which envisaged the development of 56 sectors in the capital city, he said.
According to a booklet on Islamabad published by the CDA in late 1990s, the Authority had carried out a review of the original master plan in the mid-1980s. At least two major changes were made to the original master plan in this review. Firstly, a new concept of model towns or villages in the rural belt of the capital city was introduced. Eight such model villages were established including Rawal Town, Humak, Chak Shehzad, Margalla Town, Tarlai Kalan, Alipur Farash, Kuri and Nurpur Shahan.
The basic objective of the model villages was to resettle the people whose ancestral lands had been taken over for building the capital city. The second change was the redesigning of the central business and commercial district, the Blue Area. The original design of Blue Area in the master plan had envisaged high-rise buildings on both sides of Jinnah Avenue.
This was reviewed in the mid-1980s and redesigned by two French architects to evolve a more practical and aesthetically pleasing design. The revised plan allowed only up to six-storey buildings on the southern side of Jinnah Avenue, where the commercial plazas are now located, and on the northern side, high-rise buildings of 15 to 19 stories were allowed, where buildings like Saudi-Pak Towers, State Life, UBL, Habib Bank, Pemra, etc., are now located.