KARACHI: Architect and urban planner Arif Hasan’s lecture and presentation on ‘Pakistan — Urban housing and people’ at Szabist on Wednesday explained the problem of housing in urban settings and how it is getting worse with time.

“People can get a place to live through informal ways or from formal housing schemes for which there are loans as providing housing to people is the law,” said the expert. “But not all poor can access loans. So how is housing accessed when you don’t have money?” he asked.

The answer was katchi abadis on government land. “But there is not much government land left as cities grow bigger and distances between living spaces and places of work become wider,” he pointed out, while talking about informal subdivisions of agricultural land where MNA or MPA funds were used to construct schools, dispensaries or roads.

Meanwhile, there are people who need to be near cities or urban areas as they have jobs there and travelling every day from somewhere out of town is too expensive. There is also a need to be near urban areas to be near markets, schools and hospitals.

The answer here is dense residential areas where the single-storey houses in katchi abadis started building up vertically to make more room for the people moving in on rent or for their growing families. “Those who construct this way do it through BC committees. As they get some money through investing monthly in committees they build step by step, or they do it by taking loans from contractors. There is no role of the government in it,” he explained, hence it is wayward growth.

“Earlier,” he said, “Pakistan became the first country in South Asia to regularise katchi abadis. Some 40 or so houses somewhere would be regularised for the benefit of the poor as then the government would intervene and build roads or lanes that would be at least 12-feet wide.

“Those houses were airy and bright. The children there could play in the streets, some people there would even run small businesses on the pavements outside their door.

“But now after the vertical growth with the same little homes becoming six to eight-storey buildings, the areas have become congested with no ventilation and dark areas. As a consequence there is an issue of toilets and plumbing for so many people. The children and youth, too, feel a need to go out and not spend much time at home and this has led to the formation of gangs,” he said.

Showing a map of Karachi and its katchi abadis from 1955, he showed a recent one to help understand how dense the city has become. “Banks which give loan for development, meanwhile, pressure us to densify further to fit the growing population. That’s how cities such as Dhaka, Mumbai and Karachi are exceeding their density limit,” he said.

On the other hand, another wayward growth, as pointed out by the urban planner, is the elite settlements such as DHA growing but with most of its lands lying bare without any construction as is seen with DHA Phase-8. “And still they need more land because they need money. So you have places such as DHA City and Bahria Town on Superhighway,” he said.

“In getting more land like this, they are ruining ecological areas. For example [in] Multan, Mian Channu, Khanewal, etc new residential schemes have been introduced in orchards,” he pointed out.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2018