Aesthetic pollution

Published August 1, 2016
The writer is a member of staff.
The writer is a member of staff.

COMING back to Karachi after some time spent away, I was left slightly perplexed. The streets felt unfamiliar. It wasn’t something I could precisely put my finger on, but while everything was the same — the same traffic chaos, the same smoke and noise, even the same beat cops and newspaper sellers — everything was, at some very fundamental level, also very different.

Most people would be familiar with the experience of a toothache, or some such minor yet persistent irritation that the body has carried around for so long that it has faded into a nagging background pain that must be endured rather than remarked upon. And when, by some miracle, that pain abates, it is nothing short of a revelation.

That is what it was like when it finally dawned upon me what was different about Karachi: a hurt noticeable by its absence. It was the lack of advertisement hoardings crowding on each and every available space in public, exhorting one to buy, acquire, covet this or that commodity. It was the lack of billboards blocking the sky from one’s sight, leering down upon road users as they undertook the daily struggle, as though taunting them about the life that will always be almost visible to them but outside their reach. It was the lack of giant panaflex skins, the thirst for which has for years been leading to trees being cut down in this desert city, to the facades of graceful buildings being defaced, to a pollution of an aesthetic nature that is ubiquitous.


The billboards are missing, and Karachi feels less crowded.


The removal of these eyesores is being achieved through an intervention by the Supreme Court of Pakistan as result of an application filed in 2011 regarding advertisement tax on outdoor billboards. In May, the court ordered a complete ban on the grant of permission by any competent authority to instal hoardings on any portion of public space or property in the city, and directed all the relevant authorities to immediately remove the ones already installed.

Just over a week ago, a three-judge Supreme Court bench reiterated the demand, threatening that charges for contempt of court would be initiated against the chief executive officers of cantonment boards and the administrators of Karachi’s municipal and district municipal corporations if the orders were not complied with. And while the signage has not been removed in its entirety (as the judges noted), additional attorney general Salman Talibuddin did inform the court that 98 per cent of hoardings had been removed from the limits of federal civic agencies.

To say that the result is something like freedom is no exaggeration. Suddenly, and against all hope (because the judicial system has made these sorts of demands before, to mixed success), the city feels less crowded, less threatening, more accommodating. I have little faith that matters will continue like this, because the renting out of hoarding space involves turnovers worth millions of rupees, but one can only hope.

And that is the answer to why it took the intervention of as high a body as the Supreme Court to address such an obvious problem. As compared to Lahore and Islamabad, Karachi doesn’t seem to have ownership – not by the political party that leads it, not by civic executors. An answer could potentially have been found in the local governance body, but that has been hamstrung since its inception.

As a result, the city and its denizens struggle on as best as they can. From time to time, there are initiatives, led by a frustrated public, that lead mostly to nought in the face of an immovable city administration. In the recent past, there was the #fixit campaign where the chief minister’s attention was drawn to broken roads and potholes. That ended when the lead organiser became embroiled in what he claimed was harassment by the police. Traders in Saddar held a ‘sewer fashion parade’ to protest against overflowing drains; that netted little more than a temporary clean-up.

Recently, we were promised, yet again, that the city would be cleaned up, and the social media is awash with images of garbage dumps that citizens want removed. But the more cynical amongst us advise against holding one’s breath.

By comparison, Delhi regulates the erection of billboards in outdoor spaces with a view to not just avoid cluttering the city landscape but also to ensure the safety of road users that may be distracted by a surfeit of advertising. And last year, in Tehran, for 10 days, all the advertisements on hoardings were replaced by images of artworks by artists of local and foreign renown. The idea was to encourage citizens to engage with art by turning the city into a massive art gallery, and residents woke up one day to find that ads for washing machines or coolers had been replaced by works by Picasso or Matisse.

Would that there will be a day when Karachi can follow suit.

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 1st, 2016

Opinion

Editorial

Judiciary’s SOS
Updated 28 Mar, 2024

Judiciary’s SOS

The ball is now in CJP Isa’s court, and he will feel pressure to take action.
Data protection
28 Mar, 2024

Data protection

WHAT do we want? Data protection laws. When do we want them? Immediately. Without delay, if we are to prevent ...
Selling humans
28 Mar, 2024

Selling humans

HUMAN traders feed off economic distress; they peddle promises of a better life to the impoverished who, mired in...
New terror wave
Updated 27 Mar, 2024

New terror wave

The time has come for decisive government action against militancy.
Development costs
27 Mar, 2024

Development costs

A HEFTY escalation of 30pc in the cost of ongoing federal development schemes is one of the many decisions where the...
Aitchison controversy
Updated 27 Mar, 2024

Aitchison controversy

It is hoped that higher authorities realise that politics and nepotism have no place in schools.