Writing of the Bureaucracy; Signs of Paper; Associations of Paper; Background of the Study; 1. The Master Plan and Other Documents; Splendid Isolation; The Dynapolis and the Colonial City; Communities of All Classes and Categories; From Separation to Participation; 2. Parchis, Petitions, and Offices; At Home in the Office; Parchis, Connections, and Recognition; Petitions: Citizens, Bureaucrats, and Supplicants; Influence; 3. Files and the Political Economy of Paper. The Materiality of CasesIndividual Writers and Corporate Authority; Tactics of Irresponsibility and the Byproduct of the Collective; Particular Projects and Collective Agency; A Contest of Graphic Genres; 4. The Expropriation of Land and the Misappropriation of Lists; Problematics of Reference and Materiality; Early Planning and Failed Opposition; Shifting Houses and Dummy Houses; Demolition Certificates; Package Deals and Individual Signatures; Loose Lists; Mediating like a State; 5. Maps, Mosques, and Maslaks; A Mosque for Every Community; A Mosque for Every Maslak; Claims on the Map. Temporality of Maps and Islamic Adverse PossessionSquatting according to Plan; Conclusion: Participatory Bureaucracy; Notes

In the electronic age, documents appear to have escaped their paper confinement. But we are still surrounded by flows of paper with enormous consequences. In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. What are the implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes? Government of Paper explores this question in the routine yet.