This dissertation explores Pakistani national identity through the lens of the capital city, Islamabad. I examine the design, history, and contemporary everyday life of this ‘only truly Pakistani city’, described as such because it is the only city built after the creation of Pakistan. While it is often imagined as the symbolic centre of the new nation, an ideally Pakistani space, in practice Islamabad persistently blocks out and rejects anything identifiably Pakistani, rather than embracing or embodying it. I show that the modernist, planned capital, in its very difference and separation from the wider nation, in fact reflects Pakistan's struggle to define a satisfying national identity that embraces the diversity of its population. That struggle emerges from the nation's particular history, where the idea of Pakistan from the start relied for its power largely on the vagueness or emptiness of that idea, such that it could encompass the disparate meanings that different groups attached to it. The idea was also associated with purity, connected to religious exclusivity and idealism. The materialization of the nation in practice, the reality of its land, its people, their beliefs and practices, and their insistent reminder of the India left behind, has constantly challenged the purity and emptiness of the idea.

My ethnographic research explores the discourse and practices of both the official urban administration of Islamabad and of middle class urban residents, in their efforts to maintain the city as a green, orderly, disciplined space. They seek as such to set their city and themselves apart from the wider nation, but at the same time continue to insistently and proudly identify with that same nation. In studying the tension experienced by the urban middles classes between their desire to identify with their nation, and to remain separate from it, the dissertation speaks to a more general, wider tension in cities and nations across the globe, a tension, underlain with fear and conceptions of taste, which lies at the heart of the challenge in transforming democracy from an ideal into democracy in practice.