KARACHI: Speakers at the inaugural session of an international conference held on Friday at the NED University of Engineering and Technology highlighted the need for research to understand and tackle emerging challenges due to growing population and urbanisation.

The two-day conference titled ‘Urban Resilience and Adaption’ has been organised by NED’s department of architecture and planning.

Highlighting the challenges being faced by cities, especially in the developing world, urban planner and activist Arif Hasan, the chief guest, said significant changes were taking place in the world and the most important among them was the changing pattern of migration.

“The large scale of migration is unprecedented, influencing life in cities all over the world,” he said, while giving examples of Jakarta, Dhaka and Karachi.

In the context of Karachi, he said the factors leading to migration, among others, included the failure of the rural economy to meet the population’s cash needs and the end of community governance in rural areas and their self-sufficiency.

The situation, he said, had made land an important issue and led to low-income settlements and densification of urban areas, a phenomenon that had been linked to urban heat island effect.

“Studies have shown serious adverse impact of over-crowdedness. Such living conditions make management of a disaster very difficult,” Mr Hasan explained, adding that encroachment of storm-water drains and reduction in green cover contributed to urban flooding.

Karachi, he noted, was growing in an unsustainable way where 62pc population lived in low-income settlements (23pc land) whereas 36pc lived in high-income settlements (77pc land).

“Though it is historically accepted that urban resilience and adaptation work better in a local government system, the concept is not part of official thinking,” he said, urging academics to move from documentation to involvement in (community) projects.

Giving a presentation on his research paper titled Urban Morphology and Local Citizens in China’s Historic Neighbourhoods, Dr Zhu Qian, the keynote speaker associated with the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said that studies on Chinese urban morphology portrayed the evolution of historic neighbourhood physical form, either overlooking the everyday life of local population or disconnecting from ordinary citizens.

“The limits in research can possibly be ascribed to [the Chinese] state’s authoritarianism in local urban affairs,” he said, detailing the historical neighbourhood morphology.

In his brief remarks, NED Vice Chancellor Prof Sarosh Hashmat Lodi stressed the need for research to explore new directions and innovations for broader range of issues related to growing social, economic, environmental and physical challenges the city faced.

Prof Noman Ahmed, chairman of the department of architecture and urban planning, thanked the guests including some experts from India-held Kashmir for participating in the conference.

Published in Dawn, March 25th, 2017