Islamabad – Pakistan's purpose-built new capital city at the foothills of the Himalayas – was one of the most significant urban reconstruction projects of the twentieth century. It marked the coming together of two historical events: on one side, the takeover of power of General Ayub Khan and his need to prove to his nation and the world at large that he was better at doing ‘development’ than any previous administration; and on the other, the rise to promise of a global discourse of developmental urbanism, epitomized by Islamabad's chief designer, the Greek architect and development consultant Constantinos A. Doxiadis. Drawing on new and not previously used primary material from Doxiadis's company archives, this article offers a historical contextualization and an interpretation of the Islamabad project. The commission to build a new city did not fall into Doxiadis's lap as a stand-alone project, but marked the culmination of years of lobbying work in Pakistan, in which international players like the Ford Foundation were closely involved. Moreover, the ‘meaning’ of Islamabad cannot be properly evaluated without seeing it in conjunction with its ‘sister’ project – also a Doxiadis creation – the refugee resettlement township of Korangi in Karachi. This article argues that Islamabad's design is best understood as a case of ideological ‘displacement’. This is to say that it was not just another example of how top-down planning inevitably ‘failed’ in the Third World, even though Doxiadis's trademark approach of Ekistics easily lends itself to such an interpretation. Rather it was a case of deploying a planning methodology designed to make future megacities ‘safe’ to an urban space that was in no danger of ever becoming such a megacity. Islamabad's closest equivalent in the planning history of South Asia was in fact the colonial Hill Station, an idealized mountain ‘village’ from where the most striking features of urbanity had been deliberately removed.