An Architectural Analysis of the Walled City: A “Pilot Experiment” of Collaboration with the Building and Architectural Engineering Department of Bahauddin Zakariya University

Abstract

Sixteen students and one professor from the Faculty of Architecture and Engineering of the Bahauddin Zakariya University were involved in an on-the-ground preliminary survey of the Walled City of Multan. The purposed of this work was to understand the structure of the city and to develop a cartographic analysis designed to create the basis of metric-type morphology studies of the historical city buildings.

This experiment proved to be helpful in recognizing the historical and architectural heritage of the Walled City of Multan through an urban study that revealed the character of the city as well as its heritage. That task was not easy to implement in a country considered strong in development, where increasing economic pressure is causing numerous replacement operations of ancient artifacts.

The redrawing of urban spaces as a mapping operation was helpful in determining the shapes of the city, a study that had never been carried out previously. The study of the city, not just of its function but also of its morphological qualities, in the absence of reliable documentation, was for the students a path of initiation, observation, and discovery of elements useful to the understanding of the city structure through freehand drawings interpolated with satellite images.

The educational activity prefigured the desire to encourage students, administrators, and civil society in general to protect the unique historical and architectural heritage of this part of the Punjab region.