Saving Kabul From The Planners?

"As with any disaster, natural or manmade, there are two kinds of destruction going on in Afghanistan: that caused by the war and the wrecking by city planners of what remains. The looming urban disaster that concerns me is likely not on the radar screens of Prime Minister Stephen Harper or the good Canadian troops stationed in the south of Afghanistan. But it should be. What's at risk is the survival of historic Kabul, a neighbourhood of elaborately decorated mud buildings - tea houses, historic mosques, public baths - that city planners would like to eliminate so as to allow a six-lane highway to run through it.

In Kabul, the gorgeous, idiosyncratic detailing of the abode structures, the result of layering of culture and religion, is increasingly under threat. For one thing, the nation's capital has exploded from a population of one million in 2001 to 4.5 million today - the result of floods of Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan and Iran. Besides, distinctive architecture mattered not at all to the Soviet and East German planners who dictated in a 1978 plan the future of Kabul in which anonymous concrete and brick block towers would replace the fine vernacular stock of buildings.

The civil war of 1989-1992 interrupted their short-sighted plans - neglect is often the saving of historic neighbourhoods around the world - but since a relative peace has descended on Kabul, the planners have dusted off the brutish Soviet-style plan."