In Karachi’s backyard the issue of the environment, that all-embracing 21st century topic that concerns the entire world, is worrisome. —AFP/File Photo

THE verbal wasteland that largely makes up Pakistan’s media bubbles away with what is taken for debate by us locals but which is in the main sheer rhetoric, with none listening to the other.

The Enhancement Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, familiarly known as the Kerry-Lugar Bill, is the latest in the unending list of issues that temporarily overwhelm the national news. The national hostility to America is normal – when one is beholden resentment is the outcome.

As wrote my young friend Cyril Almeida in these columns on Friday, all that the act does is tell Pakistan what it should, in its own national interest (and in the US interest which is supreme) be up to or not up to. In this rigidly unequal relationship we, as a struggling Third World nation, have little option – begging bowl extended as it has been for 62 years – but to knuckle under and make an attempt to conform to international democratic standards.

Do we wish our land to be overrun by terrorists? No. Do we wish to be regarded as a country that exports terrorism to other friendly or unfriendly nations? No. Do we wish to be regarded with contempt as a country that indulges in illegal underworld nuclear proliferation? No. And so the list goes on.

So let us stop the haranguing and make an attempt to get on with life as it should be lived – though with the quality of persons in government this would seem to be asking too much. However, hope we must have.

Meanwhile, in Karachi’s backyard the issue of the environment, that all-embracing 21st century topic that concerns the entire world, is worrisome. All politicians who come to power in Pakistan develop extravagant plans for this city.

Over the past two decades, their visions of grandeur have been orchestrated in no small measure by the rapacious developers’ mafia and their partners in municipal building control who sell their versions of El Dorado to presidents, prime ministers, governors and other movers and shakers who have a free rein with all policies.

From the late 1990s onwards the development of the ‘skyline’ of Karachi has been a hot topic with all concerned with this city. Its so-called ‘enhancement’ has given birth to lucrative schemes, benefiting the builders’ mafia and the politicians, such as the 1998-2002 regularisation, on payment of hefty fees, of thousands of dangerous and illegal multi-storied buildings, and in 2005 to the cockeyed idea that Karachi’s coastal profile should resemble that of Dubai.

Thus were conceived the DHA Waterfront Development Project, Sugarland City in Sandspit/Hawksbay, a tourist resort in Manora and increased allowable building size on the Clifton seafront. All this was to magically transform Karachi (with 60 per cent of its population in katchi abadis and its overstressed utilities and infrastructure) into a ‘world-class city’.

One critical issue to be understood is the difference between ‘town-planning’ and ‘building control’. In London, the ‘Department of Planning & Transportation administers the Town and Country Planning legislation within the City ... and advises on the formulation, implementation and monitoring of planning policy and guidance’, while the Building Control Department of the local ‘council is responsible for ensuring that buildings are properly designed and constructed so as to ensure the health, safety, welfare and convenience of people using them’.

In New York, the ‘Department of City Planning promotes strategic growth and development, in part, by initiating comprehensive, consensus-based planning and zoning changes for individual neighbourhoods and business districts’, while the ‘Department of Buildings ensures the safe and lawful use of over 950,000 buildings and properties by enforcing the City’s Building Code, Zoning Resolution … performing plan examinations, issuing construction permits, inspecting properties, and licensing trades … issue Certificates of Occupancy’.

Karachi’s urban development laws are similar: the Master Plan Group of Offices of the city government is charged under the Sindh Local Government Ordinance 2001 with developing ‘spatial (master) plans … site development schemes’ and the like, while the Building Control Authority (KBCA), under the Sindh Building Control Ordinance 1979 undertakes ‘the regulation of the planning, construction, control and demolition of buildings’. It has no mandate to undertake town/city planning.

However, in the on-going turf war, dating from mid-2008, between the MQM-dominated city government and the PPP-led provincial government, control of the KBCA (essentially a city function) was usurped by the PPP. Numerous mafias convinced President Asif Zardari (who didn’t need much convincing) that multiple ‘100-storey skyscrapers’ were what were needed to give Karachi a shot in the arm.

A committee of ‘prominent architects’ (not town-planners) was notified in September 2008 to work out the modalities. Their January 2009 recommendations for a ‘world-class city’ included formation of an independent supra planning and development authority, creation of high-density zones (not necessarily high-rise) based on studies by urban design/planning consultants, and creation of an oversight committee to ensure transparency and public legitimacy of decision-making. Reportedly, Chundrigar Road and Sharea Faisal were suggested for densification.

Riding on the back of these recommendations the KBCA solicited international tenders from planning consultants. Seventeen applications were received end-August 2009. This is not the time to indulge in grandiose untenable schemes. Pakistan, as with the rest of the world, is sinking under an overloaded over-exploited environment.

Our planet finds itself after two-and-a-half centuries of escalating consumption (since 1750) unable to cope with climate change and the horrors it will inflict on us. We need to simplify our lives and radically reduce our utilisation of this world’s increasingly scarce resources. This will surely not come about by creating ‘world-class cities,’ or building expensive skyscrapers and fancy waterfront projects, or trying to imitate Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Down we are heading, my fellow citizens!

arfc@cyber.net.pk