Current Magazine

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,
52 CURRENT FALL 2017