Day 1 in Pakistan: The Glorious grid of Islamabad
Established in 1967, Islamabad was designed by the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis during the rule of military dictator Ayub Khan. It was conceived as a giant grid split into square sectors by broad avenues, with each sector having a primary school, two mosques, a few green spaces, and a central square for shops and restaurants. The sectors are lettered from northwest to southeast and numbered from northeast to southwest. Tracing a diagonal line along the map you might, for example, cut through F-6, G-7 and H-8. Each sector also has four subsectors numbered in a clockwise direction from southwest, such as F6/1, F6/2, F6/3 and F6/4. This concept seems so megalomaniacal that it comes as no surprise that it remains far from complete. The letter series essentially runs only from E to I (with only one D-letter sector and some faraway gardens named B-17) and the numbers do not go below 5.