KARACHI: Calling the city a microcosm of the country, experts on Saturday spoke on various social and civic issues faced by Karachi and suggested ways to address them.

In his keynote address on the second day of the international conference on Karachi, Dr Kamran Asdar Ali, associate professor of anthropology, Middle Eastern and Asian studies and the Director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas, tried to form the basis of his argument by reading out an excerpt from Mohammad Khalid Akhtar’s novel Chakiwara mein visaal in which the protagonist is walking through the Chakiwara area to meet ‘amazing’ transitory and established characters that come from different backgrounds and speak different languages.

He followed it up by showing an image of the waterfront city in Dubai marked by sprawling, futuristic buildings, ‘the architecture that’s going to be part of the city landscape’. Migration also continued to be ‘urban fantasy’ in Dubai, he said, which implied the coexistence of different worlds expected to reach agreements one of which was to do with ‘lacerations, enmity and moral ambiguity’. If that’s true, he argued, we needed to understand that phenomenon. “But we also have a surplus of hope,” he said, which was why we should create a space for kindness and compassion. Expanding on the argument of such spaces, he stressed having a ‘light touch’, of sharing spaces where we could accommodate one another.

Dr Ali then shifted his focus to other cities which had ‘structural similarities’ with Karachi. Quoting a research scholar, he talked about South Africa where even in the post-apartheid period the Indian community found life restrictive because of social heterogeneity. Referring to the city of Johannesburg, he touched upon the nonexistence of a welfare regime and the black-on-black violence; yet, people were ‘collaborating’. This made him infer that there were possibilities of sharing and collaborating in Karachi as well.

Dr Ali remarked Karachi was a microcosm of Pakistan’s social life where there was ethnic and social heterogeneity. Apart from the rise in ethnic violence, he succinctly talked about issues related to gender and sexuality, narrating a story from the time when he was involved in field work in Orangi. (It was about a woman named Haseena Begum who didn’t throw her husband out because she couldn’t raise her son without a father.) He also mentioned some women belonging to different ethnic backgrounds in that area who came together to demand public transport. He carried on with the argument suggesting the possibility of falling in love with the ‘wrong ethnicity’.

He reasoned that cities like Karachi were violent but there were places in them where continuous repair work was going on. In the end, he read out a piece from Harris Khalique’s poem ‘Muzammil ghari saaz’ hinting at the ‘spirit of coexistence’.

Karachi’s demographic future

The first session of the day, presided over by eminent architect Arif Hasan and dedicated to the late Parveen Rehman, was on socio-physical infrastructures.

Haris Gazdar was the first person to give a presentation. His topic was Karachi’s demographic future.

He critically examined the role of ‘numbers’ in many observers’ delineation of Karachi’s population. He said he took them (numbers) seriously but believed ‘ethnic anxiety reactions do not suit Karachi’. Historically, Karachi had been a multi-ethnic city, he added.

Mansoor Raza shared his study on transport issues in Karachi. He attributed the transport problems to socio-economic realities, underlining issues such as the system’s failure to accommodate increased participation of women in public spheres.

Land issues

Dr Noman Ahmed presented an appraisal of land issues. He said more than 50 per cent of the city population lived below the poverty line. Thirteen agencies owned and managed its lands, including the Board of Revenue, cantonment boards, Railways, Port Authorities, Cooperative Societies, Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority, Sindh Building Control Authority, Karachi Metropolitan Corporation etc. There were laws and regulations, but it (land) had become a beneficial sector in terms of investment. The legislative assembly had also passed some laws which had to do with land. Then issues like reclamation of land, spot densification and the establishment of a parking lot near Empress Market (despite the fact that there’s already one not serving its purpose) needed to be looked into. He named all the actors involved — the establishment (civil and military), national and international corporate, elected representatives, architects, religious and sectarian outfits — in the matter and suggested that there was a dire need for the creation of a powerful planning agency.

Earlier, Arif Hasan briefly shed light on the services of the late Parveen Rehman. He said her work was extremely important to Karachi. She had documented who was doing what and her work on water tankers was seminal.

Threat to rural Karachi

The theme of the first post-lunch session chaired by Dr Kamran Asdar Ali was sociopolitical realities. Farhan Anwar’s research was based on the existential threat faced by rural Karachi. He said it was an existential threat because rural Karachi was disappearing off the map. The rural part of the city was important because of the provision of food security and to counter unsustainable urban sprawl, he said.

Sarover Zaidi spoke on tracing Karachi in Bombay with reference to a Khoja Shia Muslim majority area in Mumbai. Gul Hasan Kalmati, who filled in for Christophe Polak who couldn’t make it to the moot, talked about Sakrandas Ojha, brother of Deepchand Ojha.

The theme chosen for the papers of the last session of the day was money, density and conflict.

Published in Dawn, November 23rd, 2014