Model Colony, Karachi — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Model Colony?

Two institutions fix Model Colony on the map. The Security Press, Pakistan's mint, sits within the quarter and prints the country's currency behind guarded walls, while the SOS Village nearby has long cared for orphaned children. The cricket came from the streets.

This planned colony raised a run of Test cricketers, among them Saeed Anwar, Rashid Latif, and Basit Ali, so that a grid of ordinary housing off Shahrah-e-Faisal is remembered less for a single monument than for the players who learned the game on its lanes.

What is the history of Model Colony?

Model Colony was laid out as a planned residential scheme on the edge of Karachi, drawn up so that migrant families could settle in an orderly grid rather than a spreading squatter fringe. Local memory ties the plan to Fatima Jinnah, who is said to have asked a town planner to set out a model colony for newcomers, and the name stuck to the district it produced. Order came first.

Streets were surveyed before the houses filled them, and the quarter grew into a favoured address for Karachi families until the airport and Shahrah-e-Faisal drew the wider city up against its western edge.

Where is Model Colony?

Model Colony sits on a subtropical fringe of Karachi, hemmed by Jinnah International Airport to the west, Shah Faisal Town to the south, and Saudabad and Malir Cantonment to the east and north.