KARACHI: “Great public spaces are like living rooms of the city,” said Danish Azar Zuby of Shehri-Citizens for a Better Environment (CBE) during a seminar on ‘Protection of public spaces and amenities’ organised by the NGO in collaboration with Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom at a local hotel here on Friday.

Zuby said that without proper recreational opportunities and open spaces, adverse psychological and social pressures of life were increasingly affecting the population, especially the poor, and the level of violence and crime was escalating.

“In dense built-up cities like Karachi, public spaces are even more important. These are areas of respite and recreation from the stress of city life. They are also social and cultural spaces where livelihoods and businesses are conducted, especially for the urban poor. But public open spaces in Karachi have suffered from rapid urban growth,” he said.

“All over the world not just town halls, but public spaces too generate political views. Public spaces have a political dimension,” he said.

The city of Karachi has been made dense beyond recognition and illegally built upon, and the number of originally planned amenity plots reserved for hospitals, schools, colleges, graveyards, roads, libraries, community centres, sewage treatment plants, places of worship, municipal/utility spaces, government building plots, transport system plots, police stations, open spaces for ease and expansion, etc, are completely inadequate to serve the burgeoning population.

Consequently, schools and hospitals are being opened in residences, police stations established in parks/green belts, and children have to play football and cricket on public roads, which can be dangerous. There have been cases of them falling into sewers and losing their lives even.

Fences around parks

Amber Alibhai, general secretary of Shehri-CBE said “public spaces, such as parks or parking lots are not meant for 40-storey high buildings”.

Another problem highlighted by her is putting up of fences or walls around public parks and converting them into clubs by building badminton courts and opening tuck shops there. “The parks, which should be open for the public, are gated to collect money at the entrance,” she said.

She said that it was a sad reality that public nuisances were not addressed by police stations as they had disowned their responsibility. “There are shops taking up pavements, there are huge generators on footpaths. What is the point of these spaces if you are not allowed to use them? Meanwhile, with no respect for public spaces and violations on arcades and pavements, the public has to walk on the road,” she said.

But she also pointed out how going after the culprits had helped. She shared the examples of Glass Towers, which was encroaching upon the Clifton Road and Star Market, both of which were pushed back to where they should be after Shehri-CBE dragged them to court over the violations.

She spoke about the Makro warehouse in Lines Area that was closed down after their pointing out that it was not built on commercial land but on military land in Lines Area.

Kidney Hill and Gutter Baghicha

More examples included a politician’s building that was being built on Bagh Ibne Qasim which had to be demolished then and how they are fighting for Kidney Hill.

About the hill she said that builders around it were cutting down the hill to increase the size of their plots.

Another case she discussed was of the Gutter Baghicha that was initially a huge piece of land that had now been eaten up by various colonies, a sewage plant and a graveyard. “Because here might is right,” she said. “But should one fight back or should one just sit complacently?”

Talking about the recent anti-encroachment drive, Tariq Mansoor, advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, said that the mayor of Karachi took the initiative on SC orders of removing all illegal things. “It was also the mayor’s idea to begin the drive from a model area that can then be replicated at other areas of the city that had been encroached on. Empress Market seemed to be ideal for that,” he said.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2019