KARACHI: Every force claiming authority over the city has been asserting its authority by making attempts to regulate traffic flows. The battle for Karachi is not only for land or water; it is also about controlling the speed at which traffic flows. This was said by French scholar Laurent Gayer while concluding his talk on ‘The Garrison Estate: New Architecture of Security in Karachi’s Industrial Areas’ at the Institute of Business Administration on Monday.

Mr Gayer said his presentation was based on the field work he had done lately to gather research material for his next book which is the follow-up to his previous book, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City.

Mr Gayer began by telling the sparse audience about the first labour policy made in the 1950s as the Doctrine of Industrial Peace and said he was interested to know how it came to interact with more encompassing programmes, local or global in nature, including military operations focusing on political problems of Karachi as well as the war on terror. He said Karachi had been a fertile ground to investigate the notion of military urbanism. He said he was going to talk about that and its impact on built environment.

Mr Gayer said he would start by showing the audience the most iconic artifact of security — HESCO bastions — the protection barriers that one could see in the city. He said these barriers were ominous and trivialised — ominous, because they reminded us of the imminent danger of attack, and trivialised because people had started using it for other purposes, such as growing plants on them. He said they reminded him of a city mentioned by novelist Italo Calvino in his book Invisible Cities. He said he had recently seen the works (New Urban Landscape) of a Pakistani artist, Seema Nusrat, at a local art gallery. He said she told him not to read her work as a political critique because the elements she had touched upon in her artworks were here to stay. He said his discussion with her made him reassess the architecture of the city. However, he said, it was importance to engage with the politics of architecture. He said he was interested in knowing the encounter of law and order with corporate politics in industrial areas, or how coercion and capital were working in tandem in reshaping the city.

Mr Gayer said as crime escalated in the ‘90s and after the Musharraf regime, a new kind architecture began to emerge in Karachi. Showing images of industrial landscape (Korangi), he said everywhere there were checkpoints, surveillance towers manned by guards, iron gates, camera monitoring movements at the gate and inside. He said the checkpoints had also become spaces for advertising, hence the coercion-corporate link. He showed a checkpoint on which logos of both Rangers and a fabric making company were written. He said most of them were not constructed by the Rangers and had multilayered authority.

Mr Gayer then spoke on the SITE area which he said was surrounded by some of the cities’ volatile areas. He said the businessmen of SITE in the initial stage imagined the architecture of the area in response to certain socio-spatial threats. He said at that first stage it was corporate geographies of fear, such as the fear from migrants of the katachi abadis — the Pakhtun — invading the area to kidnap industrialists. He said that led to the removal of certain hotels as they were thought to be a contributing factor to crime. He said the role of the CPLC was significant in terms of its expertise and particularly in terms of its particular perceptions of crime. He said the CPLC suggested to the SITE businessmen to build walls, checkpoints and install cameras to separate the katchi abadis from industrial areas. He said the Rangers played a crucial role in constructing the checkpoints.

Mr Gayer said in the 1970s a controversy involved the SITE industrialist where they were asked to pay to the police force for security which they resisted because they said they were taxpayers and it was out of the question. Forty-five years later, he said, the debate resurfaced after the launch of the Karachi Operation and this time it was the Rangers requesting the industrialists to share the burden of the plan because the state couldn’t. He said the industrialists again came up with the same argument that they’re taxpayers. He said the Rangers, however, were monitoring the security situation by manning the CCTV cameras etc. He said the SITE industrialist too were officially paying the private guards who were actually retired Rangers officials and jawans, thereby hoping to maintain a direct link with the (serving) Rangers.

Mr Gayer said when he spoke with the people on the other side of the walls erected in SITE asking them how they felt for being projected as dacoits, they did not resent that; rather, he said, they resented that the walls had impeded their movement to work, and now they had to take a rickshaw or a cab to go to work, which was a costly affair.

Mr Gayer said the walls were an act of power by invading traffic flows. He said in Karachi a spiral of violence in the 1980s began with a traffic accident. He said every force claiming authority over the city had also been asserting its authority by making an attempt to regulate traffic flows. Battle for Karachi, he said, was not only for land or water; it was about controlling the speed at which traffic flowed.

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2016