Current Magazine

THE GROWTH OF KARACHI
A rural town becomes a megacity on the brink
U.S. CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEES
The realities of climate change hit home
CHINA’S GREAT UPROOTING
Moving 250M into cities
Urban Migration
No.01 FALL 2017
1 CURRENT FALL 2017

Editor-in-Chief
Monica Gallucci
Creative Director
Greg Salmela
Features Editor
Aliah El-Houni
Copy Editor
Cat Ashton
Designer
Sabrina Xiang
Cover Photo
Steve McCurry
Photographers
Robin Hammond
Carolyn Van Houten
Justin Jin
Eyevine Staff
Alex Lee
Stanley Greene
Contributors
Hiba Delawti
Robin Hammond
Carolyn Van Houten
Azad Majumder
Lily Kuo
Ian Johnson
Neil Arun
Joseph Nevins
Liz Stinson
Special Thank You
UBELONG
Lonnie Schlein
Publisher
Current Publishing Ltd
Website
current.com
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current.com/partner
Contribution Inquiries
current.com/partner
Stockist Inquiries
current.com/stockist
Follow Us
Instagram // @current
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EDITOR’S NOTE
2017
Tokyo
38.8 M
New York City
23.6 M
Shanghai
24.1 M
Seoul
25.5 M
Mexico City
22.2 M
Karachi
24.3 M
Delhi
21.8 M
Manila
24.2 M
Top Ten Megacities
Mumbai
23.6 M
Jakarta
31.5 M
Megacity Population
% Urban Population by Country
< 25%
25% -50%
50% -75%
> 75%
Source: United Nations
For the first time in history, more people around the globe
live in cities than in rural areas, and that number is climbing
at an unprecedented rate. By 2050, UNICEF estimates
that 70% of the population will live in cities. The biggest
shifts are happening in Africa and Asia.
While the pace of urbanization varies by continent, the
quest for a better life is the universal driver behind urban
migration. Whether it’s climate change, politics, poverty or
war that people are fleeing, they go to the cities seeking the
same things; economic mobility, education and access to
modern amenities. However, life in cities can be unpredictable
and these things often prove elusive.
Cities are struggling to accommodate their growing
populations on many levels. Developing cities often lack
the infrastructure, resources and economic opportunities to
accommodate everyone. Developed cities are experiencing
an influx of wealth that creates an inequality gap.
In issue one, we will explore the specific drivers for urban
migration and how they play out in people’s lives. Our
feature stories traverse the world. First we find an indigenous
community in Louisiana, whose way of life literally being
washed away by climate change, a sign of things to come.
Next we move east to China. We follow rural farmers as they
experience China’s government mandated mass urbaniza-
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By 2050, 70% Of The World’s Population Will Be Urban
2050
Tokyo
32.6 M
New York City
24.8 M
Dhaka
35.2 M
Mexico City
24.3 M
Lagos
32.6 M
Karachi
31.7 M
Delhi
36.2 M
Kolkata
33 M
Top Ten Megacities
Kinshasa
35 M
Mumbai
42.4 M
Megacity Population
% Urban Population by Country
< 25%
25% -50%
50% -75%
> 75%
Source: UNICEF, Business Insider
tion, adjusting to life in large cities, Finally we end up in Karachi,
to find a small rural city forced to become a megacity,
bursting at the seams and erupting in chaos.
We will examine what urban migration looks like across
cultures and continents from the people experiencing it first
hand. The themes of assimilation and displacement create
a commonality among people who are worlds apart. The
connections forged adjusting to an unfamiliar culture and
way of life will be looked at closely.
Kristin Lowry
Editor-in-Chief
FALL 2017 CURRENT 11

CONTENTS
29 37
FEATURES
29
37
THE FIRST U.S. CLIMATE REFUGEES
RACE AGAINST TIME
By Carolyn Van Houten
A Louisiana native American tribe is forced to
relocate after rising seas makes their land unlivable.
CHINA’S GREAT UPROOTING
By Ian Johnson,
Chinese Society fundamentally changes as the country
attempts the greatest urban migration in history.
Moving 250M into cities.
47
KARACHI: UPWARD AND OUTWARD
By Neil Arun
One of the worlds fastest growing megacities,
Karachi is cracking under the weight of its many
new inhabitants.
SHORT READS
21
25
LIFE IN LAGOS — IN SEARCH OF THE
AFRICAN MIDDLE CLASS
Members of the middle class find a voice in
a booming city defined by extreme wealth and poverty.
AFRICA’S CHINESE DREAM TAKES
A U-TURN
For Africans who migrated to China seeking fortune,
life takes an unexpected turn.
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21
47
57
15
Conversations
PRINTED DOORS
An interview with the creator of German Refugee
Magazine Printed Doors.
65
Book Review
THE LAND OF OPEN GRAVES
Undocumented immigrants risk scorching temperatures,
venomous creatures, and military surveillance
to get into the U.S.
17
A Day In The Life
A BANGLADESHI GARMENT WORKER
The daily life of a woman who came to Bangladesh
from rural India to make clothes for U.S.
fashion chains.
67
Essay
REFUGEES GET THEIR OWN FLAG
Syrian refugees and artist Yara Said created a flag to
represent the millions of refugees around the world.
57
Photo Essay
THE OTHER SIDE OF MEXICAN
MIGRATION
A photo essay by UBELONG featuring the lives
of those left behind by Mexican migrants.
68
DOCUMENTARIES ON NETFLIX
Netflix documentaries relevant to this issue.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 13

A CONVERSATION WITH:
Printed Doors
BY HIBA DELAWTI
Abwab Magazine helps refugees
navigate a new life in Germany.
Germany led the charge in opening its borders to waves
of Europe-bound refugees last year. Not surprisingly, the
hundreds of thousands of visitors began taking stock of their
host country: new climate, food, customs, and overall lifestyle
— a lot to adjust to. Ramy Al-Asheq saw many people
who could use a hand navigating the new system. So, last
fall, he assembled a team to help inform fellow migrants.
We caught up with Ramy at his apartment in Cologne.
Tell us about your personal story I’m a Syrian-Palestinian
poet and journalist. I left Syria in May 2012 for Jordan. Some
militias from the regime tried to kill me, because I took part
in a demonstration. But, as a Palestinian-Syrian, I wasn’t
allowed to stay in Jordan. I came to Germany, under an asylum
grant, which protects artists and writers from dangerous
and unsafe countries. I’m now editor-in-chief of Abwab, the
first Arabic newspaper in Germany.
What made your start Abwab? When I came to Germany,
there weren’t any Arabic newspapers. I initially had the
idea of making a website in two languages, Arabic and
German to bridge the two communities. Then a publisher
contacted me with some funding and an idea to make an
Arabic print paper. Since I have a good network of writer
and journalist friends, we began planning, and we launched
Abwab in just a month. ‘Abwab’ means ‘doors’, so it’s like a
guide to Germany.
What’s your vision for the paper? We’re not in Germany
because of choice. We were forced to leave our countries.
As a result, we don’t know much about that culture, the
life, the bureaucracy. Abwab is a newspaper by refugees,
for refugees. There are articles about education, about
finding food your recognize, and these pieces are written
by either Germans or older Arab people who have lived
here for a long time. We have sections — ‘doors’ — for
international news and German news, doors for community
news, reports, interviews, literature, concerts. There
are two pages for feminism and women, two pages for
success and happiness, and two pages for arts, literature,
poetry, and caricature. So in a sense, we are a map.
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What is the biggest challenges for refugees in their
first years? The language. Because without knowing German,
we always have problems. And we don’t want to make
mistakes. A small mistake cost me a fine, because I was on
my bike and checked the time on my phone. I didn’t know
it wasn’t allowed.
Who are your contributors? The majority of contributors
are refugees living in Germany. Our designer and layout
person is in Turkey. The newsroom is in Paris; they are
friends of mine. Because of my network, the majority of
contributors are Syrian. But there’s Iraqi writers and journalists,
(as well as) Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian, and Palestinian.
And some German.
How long do you think you’ll stay in Germany? What
do you miss from back home? For me, home is not a
geographical area. It’s about the people you know, and
the memories. I have both friends and memories in Syria,
but I have lost many friends and family members and
colleagues. And I lost a lot of my memory also. When I
think about Damascus, there is black. A black map.
But that doesn’t mean that I’ll forget my country. I will do
everything I can for Syrian people. But it you asked me now,
if I’d go back to Syria, with the regime, today? No. I couldn’t.
What is the circulation? How do you distribute? We
distribute all over Germany. The Federal Office for Migration
and Refugees, will help us distribute 10,000 copies in camps.
We’re also circulated in the Arab and Syrian communities
here in Germany. Many refugees ask us to send them copies
so that they can share with their own community.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 15

A DAY IN THE LIFE:
BY AZAD MAJUMDER
A Bangladeshi Garment Worker
An H&M Clothing factory in Bangladesh.
Parul Begum was anxious as she sloshed through puddles
towards the six-story factory with flaking plaster walls. It was
almost 8 a.m. and she couldn’t afford to be late. Late three
times, they dock a day’s pay.
Inside, almost 2,000 workers, mostly women, were making
shirts — stitching, ironing, packaging. On each floor, they
worked in 19 lanes, more than 100 to a lane. The air was dusty
with lint so they all wore masks.
Welcome to the Aplus clothing factory in Dhaka, one of
countless operations supplying garments for big brand names
in the West. This factory makes shirts for men and women for
major discount retail chains in Europe and the United States,
though the owner declined to say which ones.
Among the 4 million working in Bangladesh’s booming
clothing sector, those at Aplus can count themselves lucky.
This is considered a “top factory”, meeting government health
and safety standards and compliance codes set by buyers. Its
workers earn overtime, annual vacations and maternity leave.
It has a medical doctor on the premises.
But despite a salary of $63 a month — 66 percent above
the basic industry wage, thanks to her 25 years of experience
as a sewing machine operator — Parul can scarcely make ends
meet. And every day is a 12-hour slog, since she needs to
accumulate overtime to pay her bills. She’s 39 years old but
looks older.
In Lane 13, Parul was sewing sleeves for casual shirts. She
needed to sew a sleeve a minute, 60 an hour. A German buyer
had ordered 450,000 shirts. If they missed their deadline, the
factory would have to send the shirts by air at double the cost.
Supervisors patrolled the lanes to monitor progress. Quality
controllers checked the output.
It was hot. Fans hummed in open widow sows. Parul was
looking frail. By 11 a.m. she had sewn only 140 sleeves, 40
short of her quota. She was transferred to Lane 2, where everyone
was frantically working on an order for 18,000 ladies shirts
for delivery to the United States a week later.
Big brand names like Tommy Hilfinger and the Gap outsource
to Bangladesh. Clothing accounts for 80 percent of the
country’s exports and have risen five-fold in the past decade
into a $21.5 billion industry.
Bangladesh is now the second-largest garment exporter
by value in the world after China. Few countries can compete
16 CURRENT FALL 2017

with its huge supply of cheap labor and infrastructure, so foreign
companies stay in the face of intensifying criticism of
unsafe and exploitative working conditions.
Those criticisms reached fever pitch in April when the Rana
Plaza complex just outside Dhaka collapsed, killing more than
1,130 people, mostly garment workers who had been told to
return to work despite visible cracks in the structure.
But there is little sign that foreign companies have withdrawn
business from Bangladesh. Garment exports rose strongly in
June and are up 13 percent over the year, government data
show. It’s hard to beat Bangladesh’s labor costs, which are falling
in real terms and, adjusted for the cost of living, are 27
percent below nearest rival Cambodia,
according to Center for American Progress/Workers
Rights Consortium data.
The world’s largest fashion retailers,
Inditex SA, owner of the Zara chain, and
H&M, are the biggest customers in Bangladesh.
Europe buys about 60 percent
of its apparel exports while the United
States buys less than 25 percent.
After the Rana Plaza disaster, 70
European firms have signed a pact
to better monitor and improve safety
standards at the factories where they
outsource, and U.S. firms have followed
suit with their own accord. But
clothing retailers have signed pacts before
to little avail.
Parul ate lunch at 1:30 p.m., sitting
on the floor in the women’s canteen.
The factory supplies no food and all the
tables and chairs were taken. Forty-five
minutes later, she was back at work.
By afternoon, the garment workers were tiring. For the
next six hours, Parul worked on, pausing only for some water.
Tamiz Uddin Ahmed, the factory’s chief executive officer,
takes pride in supplying clean drinking water. He ferries it to
work in his Toyota. “We collect the water from a deep well,
put it in a jar and bring to the factory every day,” he said.
A doctor and two nurses are available during working
hours and visits are free, a company official said. Parul has
only visited the factory doctor once. She feared management
might deduct money from her salary, though she does not
know whether they have. She can’t read.
The Aplus offices closed at 5 pm but the first batches of
garment workers didn’t finish until 7 p.m. Parul was asked to
stop sewing and help a fellow worker by carrying away the
stitched items for the final hour.
She didn’t leave work until 8:00 pm. It was dark outside.
Still, she felt it was a lucky day. Her eldest daughter, Jesmin,
would be waiting for her at home with her two nieces. There
would a family dinner of gourd, pulse and rice.
Home is a tiny room in a tin-shed shanty in the glitzy Pallabi
Extension area on the northern outskirts of Dhaka, about
1 kilometer and a half from the factory. The shanty has three
rows, each containing six rooms, each housing four to six
people. About 30 residents on each row share two toilets,
one bathroom and two stoves with gas connection.
Parul was 14 years old and destitute
when she first came to Dhaka with
her two sisters and brother in 1988. A
flood had swept away her family’s small
plots of land and all their possessions
in Barisal district, some 250 kilometers
southwest from the capital.
She took a job in a garment factory
for a monthly salary of Tk 150 and
married a dye worker a year later. Her
career coincided with the explosive
growth of the ready-made garment
business in Bangladesh. Her brother
also is a dye worker and lives in Dhaka
with his family, while her younger sister
is a housemaid in Saudi Arabia.
All was well until her husband had an
affair. “When he left us, I was out of work
because of illness,” said Parul. “My second
daughter took a job in an embroidery
shop and that was how we had to
live — almost every day, half-fed.”
Jesmin is Parul’s best hope for a better future. She has completed
the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in English at the
madrasa and is promised a teaching job. If she gets it, Parul
said her family will move to a better house.
The only bed in the small room can hold three people at
best. The others must sleep on the cement floor. The plates,
glasses, cooking pots and drinking jars are placed beneath the
bed to keep some space open to dine, sleep, pray and play
the board game Ludo in their leisure time, if there is any.
The table has an old Royal brand TV. The rest of the furniture
consists of a plastic chair and two drums for keeping rice and
other food items. Parul can’t afford the monthly TV satellite
connection fee of Tk 300 ($3.75), or nearly two days wages.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 17

Indian women collect water from a broken
pipe in a slum on the outskirts of Bangladesh.
No light enters the room and the little window on the side of
the aisle allows very little air to pass through. Upon entering, a
visitor is greeted by an odd, goatish smell, created by so many
people living in the congested space. The only ceiling fan often
is stilled by frequent electricity outages.
Daily life for Parul is punctuated by queuing, whenever she
needs to cook food, go to the toilet or even when she brushes
her teeth.
Out of her salary, Parul sends Tk1,000 each month to support
her mother in her village. She spends TK1,800 on rent, Tk 700
on medicine and the rest goes on food. The small room in the
slum costs Tk 3,100 but Parul shares costs with her two nieces.
“It’s really tough to maintain the family budget,” Parul said.
“Whenever someone gets sick I have to cut our food budget.”
After dinner, she swallowed three tablets: a painkiller, an anti-inflammatory
drug and a gastric and ulcer drug. A pharmacist
had recommended she take them to sooth her aching body.
She didn’t have the money to visit a doctor.
Parul can barely sign her name. She doesn’t have a bank account,
let alone any savings. She said she had considered working
as a housemaid, the lowest ranking occupation in Bangladesh,
but dropped the plan out a sense of dignity.
“If I work as a housemaid, I know I will not get a good groom
for my daughter,” she said.
What did she think when the Rana Plaza collapsed? Did she
consider quitting?
“When you hear something like this it obviously creates panic,”
Parul said. “But we can’t leave the job just because of this.”
Photos by Stanley Greene
A woman sweeps the floor
in a compliant factory.
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Residents stand on their
balconies at a shanty town.
The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 19

20 CURRENT FALL 2017

Short Read
LIFE IN LAGOS
In Search Of The
African Middle Class
Lagos, Nigeria, is Africa’s most populous metropolitan area, with an estimated 21 million
inhabitants. It also boasts the biggest economy of any city in Africa, housing some
of the richest people on the continent, as well as huge numbers of poor.
We attempt to make understanding foreign societies easier
by putting them into neat little boxes in our heads. The
French are like this, the Chinese like that. It’s how we make
sense of the world.
The great thing about working for National Geographic is
having the time to challenge preconceived ideas of a people
or a place. We leave realizing that those neat little boxes
don’t work; life “over there” is as complex as it is here.
I went to Dolphin Estate in Lagos, Nigeria, to see a typical
working-class neighborhood from where the oft-reported
on African middle class was rising.
Like many of my encounters in this enormous, changing
city, it wasn’t what I expected.
I went to Dolphin because it looked poor — the type of
place where people could only go up. The buildings are ramshackle,
there is rarely electricity, water must be delivered by
hand, the streets are often flooded. If you were driving by, you
would assume that this was a concrete slum. But that would
be wrong. A closer investigation reveals more. Multiple satellite
dishes hang off every building, men with briefcases and
women in skirt suits come and go; the cars parked on the road
outside the apartments are all modern and shiny. Come early
in the morning and you would see them being cleaned. Stay
a little longer and you would see that those cleaning the cars
are the drivers employed to chauffeur the cars’ owners.
I went to Dolphin Estate to find those who would make up
the middle-class of the future and discovered that much of
Dolphin Estate had already made it.
But it wasn’t a simple error of judgment, it was a complex
one. Along with the teachers and civil servants with shiny cars
FALL 2017 CURRENT 21

The middle class neighborhood of Dolphin
High Rise Estate, Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria.
who make up Dolphin’s middle class, there were the mechanics
and traders and tailors who don’t have cars: the working
class. Then there are those who live on the estate to serve the
middle class: those who deliver the water, and do odd jobs.
These were mostly Nigerians
from the north of the country;
it’s much poorer there, so many
northerners travel south in search
of manual work.
The more I delved, the more
colorful and diverse Dolphin
became. There was the young
woman studying Russian at university
— she proudly told me of
her trip to Moscow; the young
girl who wanted to be a writer,
but she couldn’t read because
her glasses were broken; the
robe-wearing evangelist; the Manchester United fans (they’re
everywhere!); The guy with the little photo studio who Photoshopped
exotic backgrounds into his photos.
There were teenagers whose parents had a generator and
who watched “Spiderman” while the rest of the estate was
without power; their apartment was so loud they couldn’t hear
us knocking on the door. I met a couple who ran a non-governmental
organization who proudly announced they were
HIV positive before even telling me their names. I watched
Chinese soap operas while children prepared for school and
their father, a Muslim, made his
morning prayer. I ate rice and
canned fish under a spotlight after
the electricity went out and
plunged the apartment I was in
into darkness. I peeked in on
a private gym where muscular
men lifted lumps of concrete,
and into a makeshift fitness studio
where women did aerobics.
Complex communities are a
challenge for storytellers. Those
boxes we use to simplify and
compress are helpful when describing
a place, especially when you have a limited number
of words and photos. But they are also a problem, especially
when it comes to Africa.
One of the reasons I decided to make this project about
Lagos was that I wanted to make work that challenged our
view of the continent. So often, people describe Africa like a
22 CURRENT FALL 2017

Short Read
Mr. Tajudeen Bakare is seen at his family’s home
in Dolphin Estate with his daughter, Hazeezat
Bakare, 11, son, Hamzat Bakare, 8, and daughter,
Hammeerat Bakare, 4.
Dolphin High Rise Estate,
Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria.
single country with a single
11%
culture. I’m often asked by
well-meaning people to explain
the African mentality
OF NIGERIANS ARE
towards such and such, or
what do Africans think about
MIDDLE CLASS
this or that? On a continent
with a population nearing a
billion, and 54 countries and many, many more cultures, there
is no single answer.
Part of the reason I went to Lagos was to do a story about
Africa’s diversity. Rather than trying to define a place with a
few pictures, I wanted to create work that embraced the city’s
complexity — that showed a small slice of the continent and
left people with the idea that there is much more to Lagos, and
to Africa, than can be captured in any article or photo essay.
I went to Dolphin to find Lagos’ rising middle class. I went
there falling into the usual trap of trying to define a people and
a place in a narrow way.
I did find the rising Lagos’ middle class in Dolphin, but I
also found much more. Story and photos by Robin Hammond
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24 CURRENT FALL 2017

Short Read
WHEN LAMIN CEESAY, an energetic 25-year-old from Gambia,
arrived in China last year, he thought his life had made a turn
for the better. As the oldest of four siblings, he was responsible
for caring for his family, especially after his father passed
away. But jobs were few in his hometown of Tallinding Kunjang,
outside of the Gambian capital of Banjul. After hearing
about China’s rise, his uncle sold off his taxi business and the
two of them bought a ticket and a paid local visa dealer to get
them to China.
“It was very developed. The tall buildings, everything was
colorful. I thought, okay my life is going to change. It’s going to
be better. Life is good here,” Ceesay tells Quartz, describing
his first impressions of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
Gambia, a small country of just under 2 million people in
West Africa, has been losing entire villages to migration mostly
to Europe, but also to China. Chinese border restrictions have
been easier than in Europe or North America and Guangzhou
has become a hub for African migrants, traders, and entrepreneurs.
In Gambia, youth unemployment is high,almost 40%,
encouraging people like Ceesay to look east.
“All I knew is that China was a world-class country and the
economy is good,” he said.
But Ceesay’s new life didn’t turn out quite how he imagined.
The job that visa dealers promised would help him pay
off his debts in three months didn’t exist. Ceesay struggled
even to feed himself. When he tried to move to Hong Kong
where he had heard work was better, he was escorted back to
Guangzhou by police. Ceesay ended up in Thailand for three
months, unsuccessfully looking for work, before coming home.
Determined not to let his experience be in vain, Ceesay
has turned into a campaigner against the myth of China as
a promised land for Africans seeking work. “I told my uncle,
I’m going back to Gambia, and I’m going to tell this story and
explain what’s happening.”
Ceesay went on local radio shows answering questions from
callers about life and work in China. He started a Facebook
FALL 2017 CURRENT 25

“The dream that you hoped for, the better
job, better life is not there. It’s just a dream
that is nowhere to be found in Asia,”
being caught by the police with expired
visas. Several detail struggling to
get enough water and food in one of
the most developed cities in China.
There were also examples of people
coming together. Ceesay helped orga-
page, “Gambians Nightmare in China” detailing the frustrating
and dangerous situations that he and other Gambians in situations as him, by asking each to contribute 5 yuan (about
nize food supplies for a group of 20 Gambians, all in similar
China found themselves in. Now, his story along with those $0.75) a day for food supplies. Africans from other countries
of other returned Gambian migrants, is the basis of a new also showed solidarity.
website called Uturn Asia, done in collaboration with migration
researchers, Heidi Østbø Haugen and Manon Diederich, says Østbø Haugen.”They shared the food and water some-
“The solidarity of West Africans never stops to amaze me,”
from the University of Oslo and the University of Cologne. one had money to buy, and African cooks of other nationalities
“The project came about because they had a strong wish gave them left-overs after their informal restaurants closed.”
to warn others against coming,” says Østbø Haugen. “They It’s unclear whether the project will do much to change
thought they could do so more effectively as a group than as what Østbø Haugen calls the “combination of desperation
individuals, as individual accounts of failure are often written and hopefulness” that motivates many to emigrate. Several
off as attempts to justify ineptness.”
of those interviewed for the project went on to migrate “the
On the website, Ceesay and others detail the full circle, back way” to Europe, as in by crossing the Mediterranean,
or U-turn, they completed: the decision to leave home — a a dangerous sea journey that killed 4,000 migrants last year.
calculus that often involved taking on heavy loans and families
spending years of saving or selling off their few assets — China but decided to go to Europe instead. He died during
One of the interview subjects considered moving back to
optimism replaced by desperation as they ran out of money the crossing, according to Østbø Haugen.
in China, and humiliation as they tried to scrabble enough Despite years of arguing with his younger brother and
money together to go home.
describing his own experience in China, Ceesay’s younger
“The dream that you hoped for–the better job, better life– brother also left home for Europe two weeks ago, traveling
to Libya where Ceesay last heard from him. By Lily Kuo,
is not there. It’s just a dream that is nowhere to be found in
Asia,” Ceesay says.
photos by Alex Lee
Ceesay’s warning is for other African communities, many
of whom have had similar experiences. “What happened to
them has happened to Africans of other nationalities earlier,”
says Østbø Haugen, “but their desire to prevent others from
ending up in the same situation is unique.”
In fact, China’s African population may already be shrinking.
(Researchers say the concentration of Africans in Guangzhou
better known as “Chocolate City” is dispersing.) Estimates
for the number of sub-Saharan Africans in Guangzhou
range from 150,000 long-term residents, according to government
statistics last year, to as high as 300,000 — figures
complicated by the number of Africans coming in and out of
the country as well as those who overstay their visas.
As China’s economy slows and stricter visa requirements
have been put in place, researchers say more African migrants
are opting to go home. Others experience everyday
racism like taxi drivers who won’t pick them up.
The Gambian accounts on Uturn Asia depict a hard life for
Africans in China. They describe living in cramped apartments
where they have to take turns sleeping because there aren’t
enough beds. Many spent their days hiding inside, afraid of
26 CURRENT FALL 2017

Short Read
At the end of the work day; Cletis, a
trader, tries to hail a taxi to go home.
African traders in Guangzhou.
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A Native American Tribe Struggles To Hold On To Their Culture In A
Louisiana Bayou While Their Land Slips Into The Gulf Of Mexico.
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Feature
A SHOT RINGS OUT across what remains of Isle de Jean
Charles as the sun drops behind the gnarled skeletons of
what once were massive oak trees. Rifle in hand, Howard
Brunet, 14, stands on the deck of his uncle’s stilted house
looking down at the rabbit he shot on the far edge of the
property. His sister Juliette, 13, leaps down the stairs to
retrieve the body — since neither of the boys will touch it.
Next comes rabbit stew. It’s a normal evening at the Brunet
household. The kids are tough. The water forces them to be.
“We have to be careful with the .22; we need those
shells for food,” their uncle, Chris Brunet, who is raising
Juliette and Howard, said as the siblings set out empty
laundry-detergent containers for target practice with
their cousin Reggie Parfait, 13, who lives down the road.
“At one time, water was our life
and now it’s almost our enemy
because it is driving us out, but
it still gives us life”
Since 1955, the Isle de Jean Charles band of the Biloxi-
Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe has lost 98 percent of its land to
the encroaching Gulf waters. Of the 22,400-acre island that
stood at that time, only a 320-acre strip remains. The tribe’s
identity, food, and culture have slowly eroded with the land.
In response, on January 21, 2016, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development awarded the tribe $48
million to relocate through the National Disaster Resilience
Competition. But moving isn’t a simple solution.
“We don’t have time,” tribal chief Albert Naquin, who
spent the last 15 years advocating to relocate his people,
said. “The longer we wait, the more hurricane season
we have to go through. We hate to let the island go, but
we have to. It is like losing a family member. We know
we are going to lose it. We just don’t know when.”
The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaws are receiving funding,
but the fight to save their culture is not over. The federal
FALL 2017 CURRENT 29

Kenya LaMeroux wanders along
Island Road, as a storm approaches.
grant will help save the tribe from the eroding landscape, but
addressing the effects of cultural erosion is far more difficult.
“Once our island goes, the core of our tribe is lost,” said
Chantel Comardelle, the deputy tribal chief ’s daughter.
“We’ve lost our whole culture — that is what is on the line.”
According to JR Naquin, a member of the tribe, the
island once housed about 300 people, but only about 60 remain
today. Much of the tribe’s heritage and traditions have
faded away because the people have been scattered by land
loss and rising waters. The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaws
haven’t been able to hold a powwow since before Hurricane
Katrina hit over 10 years ago. For generations, the Biloxi-
Chitimacha-Choctaws have sustained themselves off of the
island’s natural resources.
But today, residents say the land loss has made that untenable.
“When the Great Depression hit, we didn’t know because
we would just trade with each other,” says Wenceslaus
Billiot, Sr., who was born, raised, and married on the island.
He and his wife of 69 years, Denecia Billiot, raised their children
there, but their grandchildren and great-grandchildren
no longer consider it a viable place to live.
Chris Brunet is the eighth generation in his family to live on
the island as a member of the tribe. In one generation, “this
island has gone from being self-sufficient and fertile to relying
on grocery stores,” he says. “What you see now is a skeleton
of the island it once was.”
The land is disappearing into the Gulf because of a combination
of coastal erosion, rising sea levels, lack of soil renewal,
and shifting soil due to dredging for oil and gas pipeline
placement. The soil that remains is nutrient-depleted because
the protective marshlands that once served as the first line of
defense against saltwater intrusion for the Louisiana coastline
are disappearing at a rate of the area of an entire football
field every hour.
As the effects of climate change transform coastal communities
around the world, the people of Isle de Jean Charles
will be only 60 of the estimated 200 million people in coastal
communities globally who could be displaced by 2050 because
of climate change.
Theresa Billiot, living on the island with her parents,
Wenceslaus and Denecia, in order to help take care of them,
commutes nearly an hour each way to her job at a grocery
store in Houma, Louisiana. Her small garden between their
house and the levee is one of the only remnants of the days
when the tribe could live off of the land.
In the distance, three oil storage tanks are visible reminders
of how nearby underground pipelines have
contributed to the shifting and sinking land.“It is hard for
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Feature
Since 1955, the island has lost 98 percent
of its land. Island Road, pictured, frequently
washes out.
everyday Americans to see and understand climate change,”
Comardelle said. “They don’t see land that was once
there disappear.”
The island, which is thought to have been named after
the father of a Frenchman who married into the tribe in the
1800s, is located deep in the southern bayous of Louisiana,
about 75 miles (120 kilometers) south of New Orleans and 15
miles (24 kilometers) from the Gulf of Mexico.
The only way into or out of Isle de Jean Charles is on
Island Road. In 1953, the year the road was built, land and
thick marsh surrounded the road. At that time, tribal members
could traverse the land around the road to hunt and trap.
But erosion is eating away at the road today. Marks of sand
and debris indicate where the water covers the road during
high tide. If strong southerly winds persist across the island,
the road will flood even on a cloudless day.
Chris Brunet says he believes that when the bayou
was dredged to build up the foundation for the road, that
process exposed the road and the island to more erosion.
“The more avenues you create for the water, the more
she’s coming,” Chris Brunet said. “It’s a powerful thing.”
Every time a strong storm heads toward the island, residents
have a small window of time to decide whether they
will evacuate. If they don’t immediately decide to leave,
FALL 2017 CURRENT 31

Keyondre Authement, 15, throwing rocks
on the island. Attachment to the island runs
deep, especially for those who shrimp and
fish in the surrounding waters.
Amiya Brunet, 3, on the bridge that leads
to her home, which fills with up to a foot
of mud during storms. Her parents, Keith
Brunet and Keisha McGehee, would like to
leave the island.
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Feature
Wenceslaus Billiot, Sr., and his wife,
Denecia, share a moment in their home.
Wenceslaus Billiot, Jr., walks on the
levee behind his parents’ stilted home.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 33

By 2050, 200 Million People Will Be
Displaced Because Of Climate Change.
their only choice will be to stay on the island and ride out
the storm. Once the storm arrives, the road out of the
island will be flooded.
“It takes a lot of prayer to live down here,” Theresa
Handon, Chris Brunet’s sister, said. “I think, ‘Please God,
no more storms,’ but I know it’s going to come.”
With every storm that hits the island comes a chance
that another home will be destroyed. Louisiana contains 40
percent of the nation’s wetlands, but each year an amount
of land larger than the size of Manhattan is sapped from
the state’s coastline. The water has now overtaken many
structures that were once a part of the community. Sea
level rise, shifting soils, and several hurricanes have led to
the abandonment and eventual demise of what once were
people’s homes.
“Climate change didn’t happen overnight, so we can’t fix
it overnight,” Comardelle said. “What we can do is make
the best of what we’ve been given and adapt.”
Many of the tribal members who remain on the island
despite the rising waters are those who can’t afford any other
option. Most of those who have left the island remain in the
tribe but are spread throughout Louisiana.
“The tribe has physically and culturally been torn apart
with the scattering of members,” the resettlement proposal
submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition
states. “A new settlement offers an opportunity for the tribe to
rebuild their homes and secure their culture on safe ground.”
“We know we aren’t the only ones,” Comardelle says. “If we
can do this, not only for our people, but to be a beacon of hope
for other communities is important. This is not just about us.”
The resettlement proposal argues that Isle de Jean Charles
“is ideally positioned to develop and test resettlement adaptive
methodologies,” something that is badly needed around the
world. As such, the plan aims to move families to a historically
contextual and culturally appropriate community.
As hurricane season looms, the tribe hopes to be spared
long enough to have time for relocation; however, with
questions from the state about how to allocate the money,
the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw culture hangs in the balance.
“To stay here would have been my first choice, but common
sense tells me that if I don’t take advantage now and a
hurricane comes and destroys everything, then where will I
go?” said the Reverend Roch Naquin, a resident who grew up
on the island and was a trapper until going to seminary school.
“This is not just about resettling the community on the island,”
Comardelle said. “It’s reuniting the community that is left.”
Having already lost so much of their land and their tribal
heritage to the water, relocation is not just crucial for their
personal safety but also for the longevity of their culture
and traditions.
“At one time, water was our life and now it’s almost our
enemy because it is driving us out, but it still gives us life,”
Comardelle said. “It’s a double-edged sword. It’s our life and
our death.” Story and Photos by Carolyn Van Houten
An aerial image reveals Island Road, which
used to be surrounded by dry land but is now
nearly washed out.
34 CURRENT FALL 2017

Feature
Only a handful of structures remain intact on
the island, but residents fear it’s only a matter
of time before those crumble, too.
An abandoned boat in front of the home of
Marq Naquin and Ochxia Naquin, who say
they plan to stay on the island. The location
of the new community has not yet been chosen,
and moving is voluntary.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 35

36 CURRENT FALL 2017

Feature
CHINA IS PUSHING ahead with a sweeping plan to move
250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns
and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative
event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle
the country with problems for generations to come.
The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural
homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland
and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So large
is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city
dwellers will approach the total urban population of the
United States, in a country already bursting with megacities.
This will decisively change the character of China,
where the Communist Party insisted for decades that
most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to
their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic
stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to
find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that
depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers.
The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs
are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the
site of radical social engineering. Over the past decades, the
Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’ rights to use
land: giving small plots to farm during 1950s land reform,
collecting a few years later, restoring rights at the start of the
reform era and now trying to obliterate small landholders.
Across China, bulldozers are leveling villages that date to
long-ago dynasties. Towers now sprout skyward from dusty
plains and verdant hillsides. New urban schools and hospitals
FALL 2017 CURRENT 37

China Plans To Move 70% Of The
Country Into The Cities By 2025.
offer modern services, but often at the expense of the torndown
temples and open-air theaters of the countryside.
“It’s a new world for us in the city,” said Tian Wei, 43,
a former wheat farmer in the northern province of Hebei,
who now works as a night watchman at a factory. “All
my life I’ve worked with my hands in the fields; do I have
the educational level to keep up with the city people?”
China has long been home to both some of the world’s
tiniest villages and its most congested, polluted examples
of urban sprawl. The ultimate goal of the government’s
modernization plan is to fully integrate 70 percent of the
country’s population, or roughly 900 million people, into
city living by 2025. Currently, only half that number are.
The building frenzy is on display in places like Liaocheng,
which grew up as an entrepôt for local wheat farmers in the
North China Plain. It is now ringed by scores of 20-story
towers housing now-landless farmers who have been thrust
into city life. Many are giddy at their new lives – they received
the apartments free, plus tens of thousands of dollars
for their land — but others are uncertain about what they
will do when the money runs out.
Aggressive state spending is planned on new roads, hospitals,
schools, community centers — which could cost upward of
$600 billion a year, according to economists’ estimates. In addition,
vast sums will be needed to pay for the education, health
care and pensions of the ex-farmers.
While the economic fortunes of many have improved in the
mass move to cities, unemployment and other social woes have
also followed the enormous dislocation. Some young people
feel lucky to have jobs that pay survival wages of about $150
a month; others wile away their days in pool halls and video-game
arcades.
Top-down efforts to quickly transform entire societies
have often come to grief, and urbanization has already
proven one of the most wrenching changes in China’s 35 years
of economic transition. Land disputes account for thousands
of protests each year, including dozens of cases in recent years
in which people have set themselves aflame rather than relocate.
The country’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, indicated
at his inaugural news conference in March that urbanization
was one of his top priorities. He also cautioned, however, that
it would require a series of accompanying legal changes “to
overcome various problems in the course of urbanization.”
Some of these problems could include chronic urban unemployment
if jobs are not available, and more protests from
skeptical farmers unwilling to move. Instead of creating wealth,
urbanization could result in a permanent underclass in big Chinese
cities and the destruction of a rural culture and religion.
38 CURRENT FALL 2017

Feature
Former farmers working on a park built
over farmland in Chengdu, where the local
government is razing villages and farmland
on the outskirts of the city to make way for
urban development.
“There’s this feeling that we have to
modernize, we have to urbanize and
this is our national-development
strategy, its almost like another
Great Leap Forward.”
The government has been pledging a comprehensive
urbanization plan for more than four years now. It was originally
to have been presented at the National People’s Congress,
but various concerns delayed that, according to people
close to the government. Some of them include the challenge
of financing the effort, of coordinating among the various
ministries and of balancing the rights of farmers, whose
land has increasingly been taken forcibly for urban projects.
These worries delayed a high-level conference to formalize
the plan this month. The plan has now been delayed until the
fall, government advisers say. Central leaders are said to be
concerned that spending will lead to inflation and bad debt.
Such concerns may have been behind the call in a recent
government report for farmers’ property rights to be protected.
Released in March, the report said China must “guarantee
farmers’ property rights and interests.” Land would
remain owned by the state, though, so farmers would not
have ownership rights even under the new blueprint.
On the ground, however, the new wave of urbanization
is well under way. Almost every province has large-scale
programs to move farmers into housing towers, with the
farmers’ plots then given to corporations or municipalities
to manage. Efforts have been made to improve the attractiveness
of urban life, but the farmers caught up in the
programs typically have no choice but to leave their land.
The broad trend began decades ago. In the early
1980s, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in the countryside
versus 47 percent today, plus an additional 17
percent that works in cities but is classified as rural. The
idea is to speed up this process and achieve an urbanized
China much faster than would occur organically.
The primary motivation for the urbanization push is
to change China’s economic structure, with growth based
on domestic demand for products instead of relying so
much on export. In theory, new urbanites mean vast new
opportunities for construction companies, public transportation,
utilities and appliance makers, and a break
from the cycle of farmers consuming only what they
produce. “If half of China’s population starts consuming,
growth is inevitable,” said Li Xiangyang, vice director
FALL 2017 CURRENT 39

Chen Hua, 50, moving to her new home in
Liaocheng. Her village house was bulldozed
to make way for development.
A former farmer, struggling to find work,
resorts to selling brooms in urban China.
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Feature
Millions of children of migrant workers are
left behind when their mothers and fathers
work far from their hometowns and do not
qualify for education in the cities where their
parents work.
Children walk to school from a housing project
in Chongqing, where their families were
resettled after leaving their farmland.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 41

of the Institute of World Economics and Politics, part
of a government research institute. “Right now they
are living in rural areas where they do not consume.”
Skeptics say the government’s headlong rush to urbanize
is driven by a vision of modernity that has failed
elsewhere. In Brazil and Mexico, urbanization was also
seen as a way to bolster economic growth. But among the
“Its a different world for us in
the city. All of my life I have
worked with my hands. Do I have
the education to keep up with
city people.”
results were the expansion of slums and of a stubborn
unemployed underclass, according to experts.
“There’s this feeling that we have to modernize, we
have to urbanize and this is our national-development
strategy,” said Gao Yu, China country director for the
Landesa Rural Development Institute, based in Seattle.
Referring to the disastrous Maoist campaign to industrialize
overnight, he added, “It’s almost like another Great
Leap Forward.”
The costs of this top-down approach can be steep. In
one survey by Landesa in 2011, 43 percent of Chinese
villagers said government officials had taken or tried to
take their land. That is up from 29 percent in a 2008 survey.
“In a lot of cases in China, urbanization is the process
of local government driving farmers into buildings while
grabbing their land,” said Li Dun, a
professor of public policy at Tsinghua
University in Beijing.
Farmers are often unwilling to
leave the land because of the lack of
job opportunities in the new towns.
Working in a factory is sometimes an
option, but most jobs are far from
the newly built towns. And even if
farmers do get jobs in factories, most
lose them when they hit age 45 or
50, since employers generally want
younger, nimbler workers.
“For old people like us, there’s nothing
to do anymore,” said He Shifang,
45, a farmer from the city of Ankang
in Shaanxi Province who was relocated
from her family’s farm in the mountains. “Up in the
mountains we worked all the time. We had pigs and chickens.
Here we just sit around and people play mah-jongg.”
Some farmers who have given up their land say that when
they come back home for good around this age, they have
no farm to tend and thus no income. Most are still excluded
from national pension plans, putting pressure on relatives
to provide.
The coming urbanization plan would aim to solve this by
giving farmers a permanent stream of income from the land
they lost. Besides a flat payout when they moved, they would
receive a form of shares in their former land that would
pay the equivalent of dividends over a period of decades to
make sure they did not end up indigent.
This has been tried experimentally, with mixed results.
Outside the city of Chengdu, some farmers said they received
nothing when their land was taken to build a road, leading to
daily confrontations with construction crews and the police
since 2014.
But south of Chengdu in Shuangliu County, farmers who
gave up their land for an experimental strawberry farm run
by a county-owned company said they receive an annual
payment equivalent to the price of 2,000 pounds of grain
plus the chance to earn about $8 a day working on the
new plantation.
“I think it’s O.K., this deal,” said Huang Zifeng, 62, a
farmer in the village of Paomageng who gave up his land
to work on the plantation. “It’s more stable than farming
your own land.”
Financing the investment needed to start such projects
is a central sticking point. Chinese economists say that the
cost does not have to be completely borne by the govern-
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Feature
The Kan Guangfu family
in front of their old home.
The Kan Guangfu family in front
of their new home, in southern
Shaanxi Province
FALL 2017 CURRENT 43

Ran Shunbi, 75, plays mah-jongg while holding
her 3-year-old great-grandson at their
relocation housing in Chongqing. She and her
family were moved from their farmland and
resettled nearby.
“Up in the mountains we worked
all the time. We had pigs and
chickens. Here we just sit around
and people play mah-jongg”
ment, because once farmers start working in city jobs,
they will start paying taxes and contributing to social
welfare programs.
“Urbanization can launch a process of value creation,”
said Xiang Songzuo, chief economist with the Agricultural
Bank of China and a deputy director of the International
Monetary Institute at Renmin University. “It should start a
huge flow of revenues.”
Even if this is true, the government will still need significant
resources to get the programs started. Currently, local
governments have limited revenues and most rely on selling
land to pay for expenses — an unsustainable practice
in the long run. Banks are also increasingly unwilling to
lend money to big infrastructure projects, Mr. Xiang said,
because many banks are now listed companies and have to
satisfy investors’ requirements.
“Local governments are already struggling to provide benefits
to local people, so why would they want to extend this to
migrant workers?” said Tom Miller, a Beijing-based author
of a new book on urbanization in China, “China’s Urban
Billion.” “It is essential for the central government to step in
and provide funding for this.”
In theory, local governments could be allowed to issue
bonds, but with no reliable system of rating or selling
bonds, this is unlikely in the near term. Some localities,
however, are already experimenting with programs to pay
for at least the infrastructure by involving private investors
or large state-owned enterprises that provide seed financing.
Most of the costs are borne by local governments. But
they rely mostly on central government transfer payments
or land sales, and without their own revenue streams they
are unwilling to allow newly arrived rural residents to attend
local schools or benefit from health care programs. This is
reflected in the fact that China officially has a 53 percent rate
of urbanization, but only about 35 percent of the population
is in possession of an urban residency permit, or hukou. This
is the document that permits a person to register in local
schools or qualify for local medical programs.
The new blueprint to be unveiled this year is supposed to
break this logjam by guaranteeing some central-government
44 CURRENT FALL 2017

Feature
A rural migrant family shops at a
mall that caters to new urbanites.
support for such programs, according to economists who advise
the government. But the exact formulas are still unclear.
Granting full urban benefits to 70 percent of the population
by 2025 would mean doubling the rate of those in urban
welfare programs.
“Urbanization is in China’s future, but China’s rural
population lags behind in enjoying the benefits of economic
development,” said Li Shuguang, professor at the China
University of Political Science and Law. “The rural population
deserves the same benefits and rights city folks enjoy.”
By Ian Johnson, Photos by Justin Jin.
POPULATION OF CHINA
Registered Urban
44%
36%
Registered Rural But
Living Urban
Rural Population
20%
56%
The Economist
The old buildings under these high-rises in
Chongqing have been marked for demolition.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 45

UPWARD AND
OUTWARD
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Feature
Hundreds Of Thousands Have Flocked
To Karachi In Search Of A Better
Life, But Can The City Cope?
KARACHI URBAN SPRAWL
2020
2013
2000
1991
Karachi Area
Landcover
Source: Institute of Geographical Information Systems, City of Karachi
KARACHI IS THE TEENAGE TEARAWAY of global mega-cities:
it is growing up fast and doing as it pleases. Here it is growing
outwards, cementing over desert and villages. Elsewhere
it is building upon its buildings, growing upwards because
it can no longer expand outwards, packing people into the
inner city because the periphery has been exhausted.
Karachi’s civic infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. It
is Pakistan’s cultural and commercial capital, yet there is no
city-wide system for cleaning the streets, repairing the roads,
flushing the drains and providing homes with running water
and steady electricity. The poor, who make up the majority
of Karachi-ites, would regard the very idea of such a system
as fantasy.
To speak of Karachi is to speak in superlatives. It is
one of the fastest growing megacities in the world and the
largest city in Pakistan, which in turn is the most rapidly
urbanizing nation in south Asia. To grasp what Karachi
is, ask what it is not. It is not Islamabad, an orderly grid of
gardens, boulevards and government buildings that supplanted
Karachi as Pakistan’s capital in the 1960s. Islamabad
followed the plan; Karachi ran away from it. The
rationale behind Islamabad , build it and they will come , is
reversed in Karachi. The people keep coming and so the
city is built, stretching haphazardly along every possible axis.
FALL 2017 CURRENT 47

People cool off near a damaged water pipe.
By 2025, Karachi Is Expected To
Surpass 20 Million Inhabitants.
Behind its expansion lies the convergence of two broader
trends , natural population growth and migration to the cities.
Pakistan’s overall population is growing rapidly. Those who do
not already live in cities want to live in them, and Karachi is
their first choice.
In the last 25 years, the city’s population has more than
doubled. By 2025 it is expected to have surpassed 20 million.
But as more and more people make Karachi their home, it
is becoming less and less habitable — a paradox shared with
many developing-world megacities.
When Pakistan became independent in 1947, Karachi
was home to around half a million people. Today, it has 16
million. How has Karachi housed them? The city , in the
abstract sense of its institutions, has not. Instead, the people
have housed themselves through an unregulated construction
sector, and the city , in the concrete sense , is their creation.
Grand schemes for the city’s expansion, poorly implemented,
have been rendered obsolete. “There are so many
governing agencies and bodies in Karachi,” says Sobia Kaker,
a researcher at LSE Cities, a center at the London School
of Economics. “They don’t follow any master plan and that
creates chaos.”
Like other large cities in the region, Karachi is vibrant,
chaotic, polluted and overcrowded. Unlike them, it is also
very violent, with a homicide rate that has been described as
“Latin American” — closer to that of Bogotá than Mumbai.
Much of that violence is political, a by-product of Karachi’s
unique history. The city’s population are mostly migrants,
refugees or their descendants, whose presence in Karachi can
be traced to a series of regional conflicts. As they have settled
the city the strife that brought them there has been focused on
a smaller stage, in struggles for homes and influence.
48 CURRENT FALL 2017

Feature
75% OF KARACHI’S POPULATION
LIVES IN UNPLANNED SETTLEMENTS
KNOWN AS KATCHI ABADI.
“Karachi has developed enclaves which are predominantly
ethnic or religious,” says Asiya Sadiq Polak, an architect and
urban designer who has taught, researched and practiced in
the city. She describes a vicious circle where each wave of
newcomers congregates in neighborhoods where their community
has a foothold. In this way, they shore up the constituency
of community leaders, who in turn reinforce their power
by using settlement as an electoral tool, awarding homes in
exchange for loyalty.
Karachi has thus become a network of competing fiefdoms,
run by politicians and their business partners. They have undermined
civic institutions to create a surrogate infrastructure that
delivers services — of which housing is only one — to their
clients and constituencies. It is their generators that compensate
for the power cuts, their buses that workers from the outskirts,
and their trucks that bring water when the taps run dry.
Along with land, water is Karachi’s most precious resource.
Perched between the desert and the sea, the city depends on
rivers, reservoirs and wells to provide for its booming population.
But many local rivers and wells have been polluted or
exhausted, while reservoirs further inland have been starved
by erratic rainfall.
Karachi’s location, its vast population and its lack of planning
mean it is also particularly vulnerable to the predicted
consequences of climate change — particularly rising sea
levels and frequent floods. In 2011, catastrophic flooding hit
the surrounding province of Sindh, sending a tide of homeless
people into the city. Pakistani scientists linked the floods
to climate change and warned of worse in years to come.
Karachi was originally one of several fishing villages
along the delta of the Indus river. The other harbors silted up;
Karachi did not. It became a port. Under British colonial rule,
the port was expanded for trade and military use, attracting
laborers from the rural interior. The city became a melting
pot — though most of its inhabitants still spoke Sindhi, the
local language.
That changed with the partition of British India and the
creation of Pakistan in 1947. Karachi’s substantial Hindu
community fled for India, while over half-a-million Urdu-speaking
Muslims left India for Karachi. The newcomers
were known as mohajirs, after the Arabic word for immigrants.
Having doubled the city’s population in less than five years,
they also began to dominate its politics.
The city swelled. Unregulated tenements sprang up on public
land in the center. Those who could not find a home there
— the very poor — settled on cheap, unwanted land on the
periphery. Restricted by the sea to the south, this low-density
sprawl stretched further and further into the desert.
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The residents of Benazir Colony either have
to walk for a couple of kilometers to get to
a bus stand or they hail an auto-rickshaw to
go to a nearby main road where they can find
public buses.
Men try to escape the heat under a
bridge during a summer heat wave.
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Feature
The UN warns that millions of people in
Karachi are at risk from disease because
of water pollution.
Pakistanis wade through a flooded
road caused by heavy monsoon rainfall.
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Karachi’s business and financial
hub stands behind China Creek.
In the 1970s, the war in East Pakistan — responsible for
the creation of Bangladesh — delivered another surge of
migrants to Karachi. And since the 1980s, the conflicts in
Afghanistan and in the adjoining border areas of Pakistan
have been sending wave upon wave of Pashto-speaking
migrants into the city. Each new community has announced
itself with a chaotic construction spree, and by the 1980s
a stunning two-thirds of the city’s population was living in
unplanned settlements known as katchi abadi. The Urdu
term katchi means rough, incomplete or temporary. It
refers not so much to the quality of the construction as
its legal status. The buildings are solid enough, and have
become so common a feature of the city that the authorities
eventually decided to recognize them as lawful.
According to Ms Kaker, the authorities realized that
rather than uprooting and rehousing people, “it might be
better to regularize settlements” which they had already
developed. In doing so, Karachi quietly acknowledged its
failure to build for its citizens and upheld their right to build
for themselves.
Recently, in many parts of Karachi, the periphery has
reached its limit. Remote and underdeveloped, the costs
of living on the fringe have begun to outweigh any benefits.
As a result, the outward expansion of the city has
slowed down, while the construction spree in the center
has sped up, the urban sprawl replaced by what the experts
call “densification.”
In central districts two to three story homes are being
replaced by ten-story tenements on the same land, often in
areas smaller than a tennis court. The buildings are usually
unauthorized and badly planned — resembling, Sadiq Polak
says, “a stack of shoeboxes.”
These homes — mainly for the poor and the lower
middle-class — are crowded and unsanitary. They block
the light from the streets and themselves lack natural light,
ventilation and privacy. With shallow foundations, they are
particularly vulnerable to earthquakes.
Above all, they place a further strain on an infrastructure
already struggling to provide for such concentrations
of humanity. As a result of densification, Kaker says,
conditions in the city center have become even more squalid.
Where the city continues to expand it is into existing settlements.
Once-remote villages now find themselves on the
fringes of Karachi. The value of their land has gone up,
attracting the attention of unscrupulous developers and their
political patrons.
In an oft-repeated pattern, the rights to the land are
signed away in a pact between developers and local officials,
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Feature
Attack on PTV building in Islamabad
by PTI and PAT workers.
“Karachi’s violence is a
by-product of deep-seated
regional conflicts among its
migrant population”
Karachi’s poor seem to inhabit a different world to the
rich of the same city. Yet, says Sadiq Polak, the concept of
the gated community is being copied among lower-income
groups, even if they cannot afford the expensive location or
materials. If nothing else, both are united in their pursuit of
a better life. It has brought them to Karachi and holds them
there still , in spite of it all. By Neil Arun, Photos by Eyevine
with villagers who held those rights for centuries cut out of the
deal. Those who campaign on their behalf risk their lives. One
of the most prominent campaigners — Parveen Rahman of
the Orangi Pilot Project NGO — was shot dead in 2013.
There is, of course, more to Karachi’s population boom than
conflict. Pakistan’s rural poor have been coming to the city for
decades, as their livelihoods are thrown into turmoil by modern
farming practices or natural disasters.
Karachi is also a magnet for the country’s burgeoning middle-class,
as well as for Pakistanis from the diaspora in the Gulf,
Europe and the US. It has been a manufacturing hub since the
1950s, and now has a thriving service sector with opportunities
aplenty in banking, media and fashion. The wealthy have also
left their mark, Sadiq Polak says, building homes in gated communities
inspired by upscale developments in Dubai.
Karachi police attempt
to quell a violent protest.
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Photo Essay
THE OTHER SIDE OF
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THE D.C.-BASED SOCIAL VENTURE, UBELONG went on a 10-
day trip to help humanize the immigration debate through
citizen photojournalism. Led by New York Times Photojournalist
Lonnie Schlein, they conducted the fieldwork in three
communities about two hours away from Merida, the state
capital: Cenotillo, Hoctun and Tunkas. In the past 15 years,
these three rural communities, classified by the Mexican Government
as “highly marginalized,” have lost a significant percentage
of their population to the United States.
MIGUEL “EL HUERITO,” 70 (left), returned to his village after
spending 10 years in California. “They gave me a job the first
day I arrived in the United States. I sent money to my wife every
fortnight. She bought land and began to build our house.
One day she told me, ‘The work is finished. Whenever you
are ready to return, you will be coming to your own home.’”
ANANIAS, 40 (right), and his son at their home in Cenotillo.
“I know there is the potential to make lots of money in the
United States. But my experience as immigrant included lots
of partying, drugs, and even time in prison, so I also know
that you run the risk of paying a very high price. If I ever go
back, I would do it legally and live the American dream the
right way.”
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Photo Essay
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JUAN, 72 (left), telling the story of how he crossed the border.
“I ran and ran and ran, and I fell down and continued
running; they almost caught me several times but I continued
running because I was thinking of my family. I had to
reach the United States, and I had to make enough money
to feed my people. You cannot maintain a family here in
Mexico.”
CANDIDO, 81 (right), worked intermittently for a decade in
California as a “bracero”, over 40 years ago. “Times have
changed. Crossing the border has always been very difficult
but it’s even tougher today. And the worst thing about
it all is that you don’t even know if you can get a job. It’s
taking a risk for a life that may be unachievable. I would tell
young people not go.”
CELIA, 44 (left), and her daughter KARIME, 26, have parallel
lives. Both married husbands who left for the United States
shortly after marrying them. Karime summarizes a common
feeling among women in her hometown: “When our husbands
leave we all have hopes that they will return soon. But
almost nobody comes back home. My husband left in search
of the American dream, and on the way he lost his family and
I lost mine.”
CLARA AND WENDY (right), the mother and the wife of Steve
— a Hoctun native who migrated to the United States 12
years ago — showing family photos. “We are two women
waiting for the same man. We pray every day that he comes
back soon.”
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Photo Essay
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AMERICA LIBERTAD, 80 (left), and her husband Mario, 81, at
their home in Cenotillo. Their four sons have been in the United
States for decades, and now have Green Cards — mostly
benefiting from President Reagan’s amnesty. Their first child
crossed the border at age 14. Mario says: “Migration to the
United States has destroyed the culture of marriage in our
village. With so many men going north this place became
a mess. Crossing the border has broken so many families.”
WILBERTH, 29 (right, at the new home he built with the money
he earned in the United States, where he lived for nine
years. “I came back to Mexico four years ago. After my sister
married and moved out of the apartment we shared in Denver,
loneliness overcame me. I felt very depressed and decided
to return home. Sometimes when I look back, I wonder if I
made the right decision”.
PEDRO, 73 (left), showing his U.S. Social Security card from
1964, when he was hired as a “bracero” to work in agriculture
in California. “After my contract expired, I returned to
Mexico. Shortly after, I crossed the border without papers.
I wanted to stay there, but there was no chance. When you
are undocumented in the U.S., you can’t be free. In the late
sixties, we were always scared. But I miss California.”
SONIA, 41 (right), with her four-month-old granddaughter.
Her husband left for the United States 17 years ago and has
not returned. “People change when they cross the border,
but often for the worse.”
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Photo Essay
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JUAN CASANOVA, 47 (left), showing his American and Mexican
passports at his home in Hoctun. “I worked so hard and
struggled so much to build a better life for my family. I’m very
proud because I did it the right way, and then I came home.
The American dream helped me build the Mexican dream.”
RAIMUNDO, 28 (right), and his wife Lucia, 29, at their home
in Tunkas. Raimundo recently returned to his hometown after
spending a few years in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant.
“People have good houses here because they have
relatives in the U.S. We are thankful that our parents sacrificed
so much as immigrants to give us a better life, but we
felt abandoned growing up here. I returned home to be a
true father figure for my child.”
ENEDINA (left), Is the mother of two immigrants, one who
returned after 13 years and one in California who has not returned
after 25 years. “I hope my son finally gets his papers,
so I can see him again. All I can do is pray.”
MARIA, 48 (right), at her home in Tunkas. Her husband migrated
to California over 20 years ago. He has been deported
several times, but now lives in L.A. “Every time I ask my
husband when he’s going to come back, he says he’ll come
back when he’s able to afford a plane ticket. It’s always the
same story. In all these years he has not saved any money. He
drinks a lot, and I know he’s not happy there.”
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Photo Essay
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Book Review
Jason De Leon’s The Land of Open Graves
De León, an anthropologist, founded and heads the University
of Michigan’s Undocumented Migration Project, a study that
uses archaeological, forensic, and ethnographic methods to
enhance understanding of unauthorized migration between
Mexico and the United States. The project provides much of
the material upon which his well-informed and informative
book is based.
The book’s focus is on the grueling journeys of migrants
who seek to circumvent Washington’s ever-more-formidable
policing apparatus in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In pursuing
this, De León illuminates their drive and creativity, as well as
the myriad forms of suffering they endure — and which often
kills them.
For De León, the countless tragedies
that befall migrants are “neither random
nor senseless.” And unlike Luis Alberto
Urrea’s much-praised, but politically
problematic, book, The Devil’s Highway
(2007), which largely blames smugglers
for migrant deaths and does little to
challenge the factors that underlie the
fatalities — De León does not hesitate to
indict U.S. authorities. Migrant deaths,
he argues, are the predictable results of
“a strategic federal plan,” which he likens
to a killing machine “that simultaneously
uses and hides behind the viciousness
of the Sonoran Desert.”
The governent’s plan is called “Prevention
Through Deterrence” (PTD), and
it serves as the book’s temporal framing.
As Timothy Dunn’s excellent Blockading the Border and Human
Rights has shown, PTD was first developed in El Paso in 1993.
By amassing agents and policing infrastructure in the most urbanized
areas along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, the strategy effectively
forces migrants to cross the U.S.-Mexico borderlands
in remote zones, the far-from-unrealized hope being that the
arduous terrain and the associated costs and dangers will dissuade
migrants from continuing their journeys.
In making some rather dense academic concepts come
alive, De León powerfully shows how PTD involves the effective
enrollment of non-human elements like poisonous snakes,
mountains, extreme temperatures, and the desert itself in the
policing apparatus. Indeed, he characterizes nature as “the
best and most lethal weapon the Border Patrol has.”. Clearly,
it is not a pristine nature, but a “hybrid geography”, one that
embodies dynamic ties between humans and the non-human.
This, he explains, has served to create a “setting in which the
Border Patrol can draw on the agency of animals and other
non-humans to do its dirty work while simultaneously absolving
itself of any blame connected to migrant injuries or loss of life.”
De León brings his readers into the complicated lives of
many and takes them to various sites — including a migrant
shelter where people recently deported from the United States
struggle to figure out their next steps, and the home of the
loved ones of Maricela, an Ecuadorian migrant whose decomposing
corpse he and his students stumble
upon in southern Arizona. In doing
so, the author exhibits sensitivity, sympathy,
and self-reflection. He knows that in
conducting research among highly marginalized
and vulnerable communities,
he risks being “an academic voyeur” as
they share their hopes and pains with
him and, by extension, his audience.
Given such care and self-awareness,
two problems with the book stand out.
First is De León’s shocking decision
to buy and execute five pigs so as to
understand what happens to human
corpses due to the animals and insects
that feast upon them and exposure to
the desert elements. (Pigs, in terms
of anatomy, amount of hair, muscle
content, etc. are good proxies for humans
in forensic tests.) As he watches one pig descend into
a three-minute “death dance” after someone he hired shoots
the animal in the head, the author is troubled by what he witnesses.
It is, he says, “violent despite all the precautions we
took.” However, he declares the violence warranted because
“other than obtaining human bodies donated to science,”
there was “no feasible alternative.” Of course, there was one:
not conducting the lurid experiment, not least because it
contributes nothing of significance to the project, other than
(unintentionally) raising questions about research ethics.
Second is De León’s failure in the final pages to take a
stance against the broad apparatus of exclusion, instead weakly
offering that “[t]here is no easy solution.” He defends this
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Migrants must traverse the unforgiving
Sonoran desert in order to reach the US.
position by saying that the book was “never about solving our
problem of illegal immigration.” Yet, in making unauthorized
mobility, rather than state efforts to repel the movement of
people in need, “our problem,” De León strongly delimits the
range of solutions, as how one defines a predicament informs
one’s analysis and thus possible responses. So, in the end, despite
brilliantly showing the utter inhumanity of contemporary
boundary control efforts, and knowing full well that the harm-inducing
nature of policing mobility in the Mexico-U.S.. borderlands
goes back to the time of Chinese exclusion (1882), he
effectively pretends that such inhumanity is limited to the present-day
PTD paradigm.
Still, The Land of Open Graves is an invaluable book, one
full of rich ethnographic accounts of migrants, sharp analysis,
and beautiful photographs by Michael Wells (as well as some
by the migrants De León encounters). It is a strong indictment
of the violence migrants face, particularly of a structural
sort, and it calls us to “better understand how our worlds
are intertwined and the ethical responsibility we have to one
another as human beings.” It deserves a broad audience.
By Joseph Nevins, Photos by Reuters
MEXICAN MIGRATION ROUTES
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ESSAY
Refugees Get Their Own Flag
For the first time in Olympic history, refugee athletes were
allowed to compete as a team. With no national team or flag
of their own, the refugee team marched under the neutral
banner of the Olympic flag during the opening ceremony.
The team didn’t represent a country, but shone a light
on the 65 million people displaced by war and persecution
across the world. “We still are humans,” said Yusra Mardini,
the Olympic swimmer from Syria who helped drag a sinking
boat full of fellow refugees to safety. “We are not only refugees,
we are like everyone in the world.”
The Refugee Nation, an organization recently founded by
refugees and officially supported by Amnesty International,
commissioned a new flag to highlight the arduous journey
Mardini and so many refugees undergo whilst trying to reach
safety. The final result was created by the Syrian artist Yara
Said, herself a refugee. The black and orange of the flag represents
the life jackets that have become synonymous with
refugees making the dangerous journey sea crossing from
Turkey to Greece.
“Black and orange is a symbol of solidarity for all those
who crossed the sea in search of a new country,” Said said
in a statement. “I myself wore one, which is why I so identify
with these colors and these people.”
This isn’t the first time an artist has been inspired by a refugee
life jacket. Earlier this year, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei collected
thousands of life jackets discarded by refugees and
covered Berlin’s concert hall with 14,000 of them.
There’s also a “national anthem” of sorts for the Refugee
Nation created by Moutaz Arian, a Syrian refugee now living
in Istanbul. By Liz Stinson, Photo by Refugee Nation
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Documentaries On Netflix
The Land of Many Palaces
Directed by Adam Smith & Song Ting
This film follows the lives of a Chinese government employee and
the farmers he relocating as part of China’s mass urban migration.
Can’t Stop the Water
Directed by Cottage Films
A Native American Cajun on the Isle de Jean Charles faces an uncertain
future as climate change washes their land away.
VICE: Guide to Karachi
Directed by Vice
Vice documents the crime and the lawlessness that make Karachi
one of the most violent cities on earth.
Cartel Land
Directed by Matthew Heineman
Vigilante groups on both sides of the U.S. / Mexican border fight for
justice against dangerous Mexican drug cartels.
Last Train Home
Directed by Lixin Fan
In the most famous Chinese documentary to date, Lixin Fan follows
a Chinese migrant couple as they travel along 130 M others to visit
loved ones over Chinese New Year.
The Human Scale
Directed by Andreas Møl Dalsgaard
In the face of mass urbanization, Danish architect and urban planner
Jan Gehl, re-imagines urban planning, focusing on human connection.
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