Over the last 50-plus years, I have sat through numerous presentations on government, NGO, masters and PhD students’ development projects, in various countries, both in what is now known as the global North and global South.

In addition, international financial institutions (IFIs), such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, have also sought my assistance. I have also been a member of various United Nations committees on physical and social development, and a consultant to them. As the chief adviser and the chairperson of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) and the Urban Resource Centre (URC), I have challenged the structure of thinking of many such projects and documented my concerns regularly.

The most important thing I have learned in the process is that most of these projects have a very strong anti-poor bias and are primarily concerned with brick and mortar aspects of problems.

ANTI-POOR BIAS

As far as academia is concerned, almost all teachers and supervisors bring their class prejudices with them, and the literature search that students have to undertake strengthens these prejudices.

The poor are portrayed as helpless and incapable of taking decisions regarding their own lives. The students are asked to observe and pass judgements on their observations. The poor are almost never asked their own definition of poverty. Judgements are passed in surveys on the basis of very small numbers. And once these numbers are cited, they become the “truth” for other students and consultants to follow.

Planning and development expert Arif Hasan has spent more than five decades working with poor communities across Pakistan and development practitioners and institutes around the world. He reflects on the major lessons he has learnt from that experience and his personal observations on what is wrong with Pakistan’s development paradigm…

In addition, studies by IFIs have an interest in portraying conditions to be much worse than they really are, so as to increase their loan packages for the project or policy under consideration. In addition, much of the loans Pakistan takes are for paying off previous loans, something that is seldom taken into consideration by the authors of the plans.

DOUBLE STANDARDS

The anti-poor bias expresses itself in other ways as well. Building standards developed for poor and rich settlements vary considerably. The poor settlements have much lower standards, the contractor is badly supervised, and the element of corruption is much higher in percentage terms. Much of the roads, sewage trunks and water pipes constructed for them collapse in a short period of time and, in the absence of well-planned drainage, low-income settlements are completely flooded.

It is not of much satisfaction that middle-income settlements today suffer the same fate as well. Even the workmen employed for the low-income settlement projects are not skilled, paid less per day, and the savings that are generated are taken over for politicians, bureaucrats and the contractor himself.

Many decisions that are taken for low-income settlements are a violation of common sense. Much of the professionals employed on these projects are barely trained, and many do not possess a qualification and are seldom present on site.

HEALTH

Health is a major issue in low-income settlements. Disease deprives a family of income and, to get well, one has to spend money, which the family cannot afford. The location of hospitals or medical facilities are not where they are needed, but in locations where amenity plots had been located in formal and informal planning.

In addition, in academic training, a lot of emphasis is put on curative rather than preventive medicine. That determines the location and design of health-related infrastructure, and the relation between disease and architecture simply does not exist in planning concepts.

The cost of curative medicine has become so high that many families are now heavily in debt because of it. Surveys show that people have shifted to hakeems [traditional healers] and homeopathic systems, so as to make medicine affordable.

PARKS AND PLAYGROUNDS

If you look at the location of parks and playgrounds, the main municipal parks are eight to 10 km away from most low-income settlements. Amenity plots in low-income settlements have been encroached upon, and those that have not been encroached upon have not been developed. Many of them have become garbage dumps and sorting yards for solid waste, promoting disease and environmental degradation of the settlements around them.

There are other aspects as well. Surveys by my office and the URC show that the poor are clear in their view that the major cause of their poverty is the absence of a roof that they own. A roof gives them dignity, the possibility of upward mobility, better proposals for their daughters’ marriages, the possibility of improving their home incrementally as and when they have money, freedom from insecurity, the possibility of their children — especially girls — receiving an education because of the savings made on rent and, subsequently, better jobs for their women, such as in malls and as supervisors in factories.

These very important issues seldom form part of the housing analysis. Perhaps this is because these intangible issues do not help in justifying a large loan.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE LOANS?

A study of loans taken by Pakistan for housing purposes shows that, while the brick and mortar part is utilised, the intangible aspects are normally not utilised. Much of this is because sociologists who can make the necessary studies for the IFIs are very short in supply, and are usually employed as consultants. It is also because it is not easy to save money for illegal benefits from social infrastructure projects.

Every loan has an element of capacity-building for the government staff and the special staff that is hired. This capacity-building usually consists of workshops and visits to foreign countries to see how projects in those countries were designed and how they function. They are usually independent projects, not necessarily a part of a larger policy.

This capacity-building component is normally 12 percent of the project cost. Over the years, millions of dollars have been invested in capacity-building. In spite of this, we keep building the same capacity again and again, and the departments for whom capacity is built revert back to their previous organisational culture and manner of functioning. We can see from the state in which the development agencies are, that no capacity has been built.

EVICTIONS AND RESETTLEMENTS

In housing projects, one of the main problems is acquiring land for them. This is done by removing existing settlements and relocating them, sometimes on the same land and very often elsewhere, on land identified and provided by the state.

The new settlement, which was previously in the city centre, is relocated to the city’s fringes. This impoverishes the people and destroys community ties. It adds transport costs to work and back, deprives women of jobs because of distances and the costs involved from home to work and back, and it puts households in debt (since the poor pay monthly for their groceries, which was possible previously because of community links). Poor households also borrow from each other in times of need, which becomes difficult with new neighbours.

The old manner of professionals and their support staff visiting settlements for long periods and spending time with the affectees of evictions is gone. And where it takes place it is like “development tourism.”

As a result, there is little empathy between the different actors of development planning and the opinion of the affectees is usually missing, except for a paragraph or two summarised from a visit or survey.

In addition, previously people formed committees and stood up for themselves and negotiated or demonstrated with their representatives and other influential personalities. Today, there is no lack of NGOs to support them or to initiate their struggle. This weakens their position as compared to before, as NGOs’ positions are more understanding and supportive of government decisions, as compared to people’s committees.

LAND AND HOUSING

There are other issues with land as well. Government agencies claim that they have no land for development for the poor. Yet they have no problem handing out large land parcels to formal sector developers. There are many reasons for this.

The state collects large revenues from the sale and or development of these land parcels. The fact that poor cooperatives can produce the same revenue over a longer period of time, with interest, is disregarded. Then there is another problem. Available land, which is next to expensive land and that can be considered for low-income groups, is not considered because the value of the expensive land will fall if it is next to low-income settlements. As a result, the poor can only live on peripheral or environmentally degraded land that no one wants.

The market, realising the demand for low-income housing near the city centre, has found ways to cater to this demand. Old katchi abadis [informal settlements] near the centre are being converted into multi-storey apartments, often four to seven floors high. They have no lifts and very narrow streets.

When they began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they provided cheap flats for the lower-middle class to purchase on cash, instalments or pagrri [goodwill money]. Today, they are not affordable, even for the better-off poor. The result is that an increasing number of flat-owners are in debt, from purchasing and continuing to live in these highrises.

These new developments are not considered legal by state agencies, as they follow no by-laws and zoning regulations, simply because such regulations do not exist. The residents, therefore, live in a constant fear of eviction. But the informal sector has devised documents of sale and possession amongst themselves.

Their legality is decided on the basis of by-laws which are applied to formally constructed houses. This is very unfair because these houses have no lease and they have never applied for a building permit — this concept did not exist when they began construction.

In addition, government surveys of informal settlements for rehabilitation purposes are also faulty. These surveys usually count houses as they appear on a Google map. However, in informal settlements, many households often live on one plot of land or in one house. So, government surveys are usually about houses and not about people. Thus, government figures are unreliable and the cause of considerable injustice.

COMPENSATIONS

Compensation given as money is usually more equitable, as the affectee can use it at their convenience. Yet it has to be sufficient to rent accommodation or purchase a plot. It never is, because the needs of the poor are always under-estimated because of the bias against them, in the name of transparency.

The manner in which money is given is complex. The affectee is viewed with suspicion by officialdom. So, something that could take a few hours gets lost in bureaucratic complexity, with many steps to take and many days in taking them. Because of this, affectees often lose day wages or have problems with their employers.

A major problem is encountered by senior residents who are invalid and cannot afford to purchase or hire a home. So, many of them end up living on the street or under bridges. At night, many parks are also full of them but, as government attempts to prevent them from sleeping in parks improve, the number of people sleeping on the street or under bridges also increases. An increasingly large number are also sleeping on the beach.

Conditions in the rural areas are also becoming increasingly difficult because of the need for cash, which daily wage labour can not manage to earn sufficiently. With climate change, the number of environmental refugees is also increasing rapidly. There are no plans to provide them jobs or spaces to live. They are also living on the streets, under bridges, or in under-construction buildings.

They manage to earn somewhat because another informal sector provides them with trinkets, such as balloons, to sell. A whole supply-chain of manufacturing exists, providing these items on credit. The women clean car windscreens at crossroads. I have never found out what exactly their men do or what the number of such a population is.

There are also street hotels on pavements that rent out a bed and breakfast for between Rs100 to 300 per night, along with some basic toilet facilities, which are often provided by the neighbouring mosque in lieu of a small donation by the user. These ‘hotels’ are also adjacent to transport terminals, where drinking water is publicly available. This is a whole unexplored world.

DENSITY

A serious issue that is evolving is related to density.

One-hundred-and-twenty square yard plots (which were owned by the father or grandfather) are divided among the children. Every child wants his/her part to have access to the road, which divides the plot, often into 3, making the divided plot no more than 30 feet at the roadside. This means that each person gets no more than a 10-foot frontage. A first floor is sometimes added to this.

So, where one family was living, now at least six families are living in a plot of very small frontage. This creates a situation of unbearable density and, as the population grows, there are further divisions and subdivisions and/ or high rises, which manage to create densities over 1,000 to 1,200 persons per hectare. This issue is seldom or never addressed.

GROWING INEQUALITY GAP

As a result of what has been discussed above, there is a growing gap between the rich and the poor.

That is why better-income young men and women stand a better chance in becoming members of national cultural and sports teams. The poor also complain of elite schools and colleges using their social and political influence in getting their members to become members of national teams.

It is for all these reasons that the upper echelons of the judiciary, bureaucracy, business and the military are drawn from the elite private schools and universities of Pakistan and support each other on a class basis. Their development decisions support their class interests, and they are not fully aware of the problems that their country and its less fortunate citizens face. Development for them means bringing the benefits they have to the people of Pakistan. But this is not possible.

IFIs have a major say in the development model of Pakistan. Their air-conditioned offices in the city centre, far away from the homes of low-income groups, their fleet of expensive cars, constant trips abroad, workshops in five-star hotels and huge salaries anger the people, and it is not uncommon to hear them say “they are becoming rich on our problems.”

EDUCATION

Education is one of the priorities of poor families. However, the government schooling system is poor, and so poor families prefer to send their children to neighbourhood private schools, which are operated by local entrepreneurs.

These are expensive as a result, so families have to decide which child to send to school and which child to send to work. This is a very difficult decision and causes ruptures in the family. Unlike neighbourhood schools, colleges and universities are very far away from low-income settlements, and a trip to them (in the absence of efficient and cheap transportation) and back is very expensive in terms of money and time. This also results in many young people giving up on higher education.

This adversity affects the majority of women aspirants. All this is in addition to very high fees (often in tens of thousands), which low-income groups can seldom afford.

CULTURE

The Pakistan state is anti-culture and against students organising themselves. As a result, there is no student political activity. It is frowned upon, if not persecuted, and arts, music, dance and drama are discouraged.

But all this has become an exclusive part of elite culture and held in elite institutions, often supported by cultural institutions of foreign countries. However, there are signs that this is changing and that the lower-middle class is slowly becoming a part of this.

There was a time when student cards could subsidise travel, hostel charges, student canteens and library fees. All this has gone due to the neoliberal economic policies adopted by the state. Not only this, but every student who is admitted to a university signs a form saying he or she will not indulge in any form of discussion or debate regarding politics or religion. With this statement, dissent, which is a basic requirement of development and progress, is killed.

WOMEN AND FAMILY STRUCTURES

In the last 20 years, the family structure and the women of Karachi have changed. We have moved from joint to nuclear families. As a result, women have become comparatively independent and also dominate the fields of education and health.

Self-willed marriages are increasing rapidly, and so is divorce. The conservative segment of society feels this is because people do not follow their religion. But this cannot be stopped. There is now a women’s football team, cricket team and hockey team, and women participate in athletics and martial arts and win. They participate in politics and participate in demonstrations, and often arrange them.

Their public presence has increased too, and many women are in important government and private sector jobs as heads of institutions as well. But in spite of fairly strong women’s movements, women complain that they still have a long way to go before they can use their independence to achieve some form of equality with their men. They earn, but still they have to cook and clean.

These changes have had a major impact on the design, especially on the incremental development, of the home and the future culture of the younger generation. Most homes possess a smartphone and have access to the internet and Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, in spite of these developments, the city has almost no toilets for women, which restricts their working hours, and during their periods, they often have no option but to take the day off.

In addition, the pavements that are available to them to walk on have obstructions such as trees, advertisement signage and broken patches. Often there are no pavements at all. This results in accidents and difficulty in moving around, especially with children and with senior citizens.

There are many newly built roads that have no pavements at all and, when I have expressed this observation, I have been told “Arif Bhai, have you ever seen anyone walk on a pavement in Karachi?”

FINAL NOTE

There is much more that I have observed and written about and can safely conclude that, unless these and many other things are taken into account when trying to solve our problems and building a future, our problems will not be solved.

Streets will flood, additional katchi abadis will be created, transport will not improve because it will not be maintained and managed, traffic will become more unbearable in the absence of management and, worst of all, women’s development will take place in an environment full of conflicts because the state will not support it.

Hopefully, a new generation that is now growing up will be able to change this.

The writer is an architect and urban planner. He can be reached at arifhasan37@gmail.com and through his website: http://www.arifhasan.org/

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 16th, 2025