Project Overview
This project investigates the impact of excessive flooding in the Ravi floodplain. It questions existing design and planning responses to climate crisis while documenting understandings of the river as nurtured by local communities.

Index: Kinara-e-Ravi

Alternate Imaginaries for the Kinara
Ravi: Tales from a River
Redrawing Constructed Landscapes

critical encounters

on shifting climate cultures

Index

01.

Alternate Imaginaries for the Kinara: River Ravi’s Edge as a Threshold

2023 - Ongoing
Lahore, Pakistan

Publication
MIT Department of Architecture

Symposium of Urban Design and History Theory, Buffalo, NY. 2025. pp 104.

In the lower riparian landscape of Punjab, Pakistan, various communities confront the challenges of living within an active floodplain of river Ravi as it flows alongside the city of Lahore. These communities navigate the dissonances of the river’s edge—its Kinara, marked and molded by persistent colonial (mis)representations rooted in practices of erasure and division. Stepping away from historical depictions that have reduced the river to a mere resource for acquisition, this thesis engages with design and the oral tradition of storytelling, known as Qissa Khwani, to propose new modes of knowing, witnessing, and ultimately, cultivating alternative imaginaries for Ravi. It stages newer encounters and engagements with the river and its communities by stitching together stories of numerous community members, the dwellers, the boatmen, and the civil defense divers, actively defying and transforming the seemingly static Kinara—their home—through cultural and economic production.

02.

Ravi: Tales from a River

Directed by Mahwish Khalil
Produced by Huma Gupta
2023

Shortfilm
Run time (9:14)
A Climate Futures, Cities Past Production
Supported by Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and MIT Department of Architecture

Set on the banks of the river Ravi in Lahore, Pakistan, Ravi: Tales from a River stages a conversation between the prose of an aging boatman and the poetic reminiscences of the river to capture a glimpse of the river's earlier promise before the city's growing infrastructure gradually consumes its ecological heritage.

03.

Redrawing Constructed Landscapes

Mahwish Khalil

Publication
Silt Magazine Issue 02
Entwined & Us
MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. 2024.

This excerpt challenges preconceived notions of representing contested sites. By framing elements of the site in flux, it renders the conditions of “natural” landscapes as deeply informed by human-made interventions.

Site Updated / 09-2025
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