STAND in Beach View Park on any given evening and Karachi reveals something of itself. Here, the boundaries that often define urban life between neighbourhoods, generations and social classes are less visible. Few places remind us so clearly that the true measure of a city is the quality of the public life it makes possible. Public parks were once conceived as green lungs, offering relief from congestion, pollution and urban life’s relentless pace. Today, the most successful parks serve a broader purpose. They bring together recreation, education, ecology and culture, creating spaces where people do not simply spend time but encounter ideas, histories and one another.
Beach View Park forms part of a 1.2 kilometre stretch of Karachi’s coastline, one of the city’s largest freely accessible and democratic public spaces. Yet despite its extraordinary setting, this waterfront remains underdeveloped as a civic landscape. Families spend hours here with little supporting infrastructure: few public bathrooms, limited shaded seating, almost no educational or cultural spaces, and little that encourages them to engage more deeply with the city’s relationship to the sea. As the threshold between land and sea, it has never been fully imagined as one of Karachi’s great civic spaces.
Around the world, the most successful waterfronts aren’t defined simply by their views. They are animated by institutions and amenities that give people reasons to return. The world’s great cities recognised long ago that public space can accommodate both recreation and culture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was built within Central Park. London’s Serpentine Galleries occupy Kensington Gardens. Lahore’s National History Museum sits within Greater Iqbal Park. Bengaluru’s Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum has long been part of Cubbon Park. These institutions extend the purpose of public space by making culture part of daily life. They acknowledge that public space should engage both body and mind.
These examples demonstrate that parks and cultural institutions aren’t competing visions of public space; together they create richer civic landscapes. The debate, then, should not be framed as park versus museum. The real question is whether Karachi is willing to invest in public space that asks more of itself. Can our parks become places that educate and entertain? Can public land remain public while offering richer civic experiences?
The Karachi Museum of History matters.
Karachi grew through waves of migration, becoming a city defined not by a single narrative but many overlapping histories. Yet, despite being Pakistan’s largest city, its economic centre and first capital, it has no museum dedicated to telling its own story. The absence is striking. Museums, libraries and archives are not ornamental additions to urban life. They are civic infrastructure. Infrastructure shapes how a city functions. Culture shapes how a city understands itself.
As Pakistan approaches the 80th anniversary of independence, this conversation feels particularly relevant. The anniversary offers an opportunity not only to commemorate independence but also to ask how we intend to preserve the stories that independence made possible. This is why the Karachi Museum of History matters.
The museum will be developed on roughly three acres of land on an amenity plot within Beach View Park, located further down the road from Dolmen Mall Clifton. The site is distinct from Bagh Ibn-i-Qasim, with which it is sometimes confused. The building will occupy only part of the site; the rest will continue as landscaped public space integrated with the surrounding park. The land will remain in public ownership. This is neither a commercial development nor a transfer of public land into private hands. It’s the creation of a public cultural institution where the history of Karachi and Pakistan can be experienced through immersive storytelling, education and public engagement.
Its location isn’t incidental. Beach View Park brings together people from every social and economic background. Families could spend a morning in the park and an afternoon discovering Karachi’s evolution from a coastal settlement into one of South Asia’s great port cities. School children could encounter the voices of those who lived through Partition rather than simply reading about it in textbooks. The park would remain a place for recreation. It would simply become a place for learning as well.
If parks are among the few places where every citizen has an equal claim to public space, they are also among the most appropriate places to encounter the shared history that binds those citizens together. The Karachi Museum of History is not taking something away from the city. It is giving something back. Ultimately, the measure of a city lies not only in what it builds, but in what it chooses to remember.
The writer is an award-winning filmmaker.
Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2026