Current Magazine

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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