The ground beneath Karachi’s feet

If you live in Karachi, you tend to feel the ground is constantly shifting under your feet – but the horizon doesn’t seem to move. Change is incremental, but mammoth. These days, the big news is the Rangers’ and police crackdown on political parties and crime, but if you telescope out, it appears to be part of what experts consider a larger phenomenon: the tension between formality and informality. In simpler words, the struggle between legitimate and illegitimate power.

The Karachi operation makes for great dinner-table conversation by itself, but if you add two other developments to the mix, it becomes much more interesting: one, the construction of at least three master-planned gated communities and, two, the possible arrival of bus rapid transit (BRT). DHA City, Bahria Town and Fazaia Housing Society are the latest additions to the city’s landscape and, judging by the lunge for registration forms, the public’s response has been overwhelming. Fazaia has run out of forms and buyers didn’t even know where the housing society was located. One real estate agent, Rajesh Perwani, could only speculate that it was going to be built off the road through Malir towards the Super Highway. The “on-money” or forward selling of Bahria Town forms for plots jumped from PRs 15,000 to PRs 200,000.

Indeed, the Super Highway, once just a place you visited for chicken karhai at Al Habib Restaurant, has become the hottest real estate in Karachi. There is a citywide shortage of housing to begin with, which makes these schemes attractive. But if you see how they are pitched, it also becomes clear that people’s renewed interest in the gated community is in part a reaction to Karachi’s crime rate and the other problems that have reduced the quality of life for the average Karachi resident: the lack of water, power, transport, and greenery.

The 8,000-acre Bahria Town in Karachi, for example, is building two underground water tanks of 400,000 gallons each and reverse-osmosis plants. It promises LNG and coal-based power plants to ensure there is no load-shedding. Security is a given. DHA City, which is spread over 11,000 acres, promises the same solutions via solar power. And as both entities knew that people would worry about being connected to the rest of the city, they have both come up with transport solutions. Bahria is building a PRs 45 billion BRT line from Sohrab Goth to Merewether Tower and DHA City has promised a 51-kilometre Malir River Expressway with BRT connecting the area to its phases in the south.

Karachi’s love affair with the gated community is not new. Housing societies have long been concentrated in the centre of the city. There are, according to the Sindh Cooperative Housing Authority, 1,700 such societies in Karachi, but of course not all of them are gated. The Pakistan Employees Cooperative Housing Society (PECHS) and the Sindhi Muslim Cooperative Housing Society (SMCHS) are two examples of open-plan ones. Rizvia Society Phase II is closed off and entry is strictly monitored. According to the recently published book Karachi – The Land Issue by Arif Hasan, Noman Ahmed et al., these residential schemes take up nearly 7% of Karachi’s land. The Pakistan Defence Officers’ Cooperative Housing Society (which later became DHA) is the largest, with 7,000 acres or 5% of the city.

As land and housing in the city seem to have grown short, it is understandable that Karachi should spread towards Hyderabad. But as this expansion takes place, so does a contraction that is closely linked to the informal sector. “The periphery is moving back into the city, into the kachhi abadis,” explains Arif Hasan, a well-known urban planner and activist. People are coming back to be closer to work as “there are excessive transport costs [traveling from the outskirts to the centre],” he says, pointing out that many women are also unable to find work closer to home where they can mind their children. As a result, the density of slums is growing – vertically. “The flats in kachhi abadis get smaller and smaller and 12 to 15 people are crammed in with one toilet,” he adds. “Sixty-two percent of the population lives in kachhi abadis and on only 12% of [the city’s] residential land.”

Who has a right to land in the city and can it continue to grow with gross inequalities contributing to social fracturing?

Of course, the question then is, who has a right to land in the city and can it continue to grow with gross inequalities contributing to social fracturing? The Karachi Development Authority had a history of good planning from 1956 to the 1980s, precipitated in part by the need to house refugees after Partition. Over the decades, it set up at least 40 affordable planned housing schemes that catered across the strata, leading to Taimuria, North Nazimabad, and Gulistan-e-Jauhar. In Scheme 24, for example, a daily-wage labourer could afford to buy a plot, which cost PRs 14 per square yard, according to Roland deSouza of Shehri – Citizens for a Better Environment (CBE).

With 6,000 people per hectare in Karachi, no one is tackling the issue of subsequent rising density

New laws in 2002 changed the way Karachi was planned and today Arif Hasan says no one is tackling the issue of subsequent rising density (6,000 people per hectare). “On the contrary, land is being acquired by high- and middle-income people for speculation,” he says. “DHA Phase VIII is empty, but they are doing DHA City. Pehle un ko to abad karo [Focus on populating this area first]… If these trends of density and land capture continue, is ke ilawa jhagra aur fasad hi hoga [there will be further scope for conflict].”

The solutions are simple. There needs to be a land ceiling act that says you can’t have a plot larger than 500 square yards and there needs to be a heavy non-utilisation fee if you leave a plot empty, as is the case in DHA Phase VIII. The government needs to hand over 5,000 hectares of its free land in the city to social housing. Tasnim Siddiqui’s Khuda ki Basti is an excellent example of pro-poor housing.

Hasan’s point of view is supported by development specialist Fazal Noor who feels that, until land banking and land pooling is instituted at the government level, Karachi will remain at the mercy of speculators and informal agents. Noor cites DHA City among others as an example of “how public land is used for group interests and not public benefit,” adding that such schemes “emerged outside the Plan, forcing the Plan to accept them even though they create much bigger problems for the city and its management.” In allowing the development of DHA City and other such projects, the government is diverting resources away from the needs of the majority population – e.g., housing finance for low-income communities – and leaving them at the mercy of the informal sector and political parties.

Those who can afford to move to gated communities will, to flee the madness of the centre of the city. Those who already live in affluent neighbourhoods in the central and southern parts of Karachi find themselves hemmed in more and more by security barricades. Prof. Noman Ahmed of NED University’s department of architecture and planning calls this “urban constriction”, which has gone hand-in-hand with ghettoization.

The poor turn to the large informal sector: "the barricades, the home-based workplaces, the kunda [system], the qingqis"

Big business and other stakeholders, such as the people behind Fazaia Housing Society, have negotiated with the state and government to carve out their land parcels to cater to a certain section of society. Without the support of the state, none of these schemes would have been possible. But aside from these stakeholders, there is the large informal sector and it is to them that the poor turn. Fazal Noor brings it all together: “Constituencies have taken it on themselves to protect, earn and manage themselves,” he says. “The barricades, the home-based workplaces, the kunda [system], the qingqis, the water tankers, solid waste recycling, the contracting systems, the estate and other agents, etc., are all informal sector operations by the people to survive and grow,” he explains.

When the Karachi Water and Sewage Board can’t deliver water to your tap, the water tanker mafia will – with the tacit agreement of the people in power. When the Karachi Mass Transit Cell and the Government of Sindh’s Transport Department can’t provide public transport, the qingqis take over. Informal systems become powerful, as do the people who run them, but they do so after negotiating their territory with the decision-makers. This does not, as people tend to think, mean that the state has retreated or that Karachi has a failed government. There is a complicated relationship between it and the informal actors (such as the water tanker mafia) and even semi-formal actors, such as big business in the shape of real estate concerns.

Laurent Gayer, the author of Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, says it is an “optical illusion” to think that the state has retreated. “The state – the military, the police, the judiciary, the mukhtiarkars, ... – remain essential to the political and economic regulation of the city, including the informal sector,” he says. “The presence of the state might be intermittent and contested, but state actors remain essential arbiters or intermediaries in all walks of life,” Gayer points out. If some corporate actors, especially in the textiles industry and real estate sector, are becoming major protagonists of Karachi’s ordered disorder, “their rising clout remains tributary to the goodwill of state regulators.”

Gayer goes on to add that, “accumulation by dispossession does not operate beyond the ambit of state power.” Corporate actors use the law, the police and other forms of state protection to grab land, exploit labour and crush every resistance with impunity. This impunity remains relative, however, as state patronage can never be taken for granted on the long run.

That long run appears to have run its course of late. It is here that the Rangers’ and police operation comes back into focus – even if it seems tenuously connected to developments on the land front. The city’s major political parties have long had close links with the informal sector, and so they have, as Fazal Noor puts it, “emerged as the virtual ‘state’, which the state is continuously trying to control.”

Karachi: A snapshot

3,424 square kilometres of land
13 entities that own land

(Source: Hasan et al. 2015. Karachi – The Land Issue, OUP)

1,700 cooperative housing societies
(Includes dormant societies and those in litigation)

(Source: Sindh Cooperative Housing Authority)

The key word here is “continuously”. The Karachi operation is not a one-time hit that will necessarily fix the city’s crime problem and push out the two major political parties. “Such operations are not a solution to Karachi’s chronic disorders,” says Laurent Gayer. “On the contrary, they sustain them by keeping violence in check for a while and reshuffling the cards between the various politico-military forces competing for the city,” he argues. For him, state forces are merely “re-ordering disorder”, setting the ground for future conflicts before another operation is launched to clean up the mess created by the previous instance of state intervention.

And so, it is the tussle between the formal (the state), semi-formal (big business) and informal (mafias) that is playing out these days. Karachi is perhaps no different from any city in the developing world. Haris Gazdar of the Collective for Social Science Research just sees it as part of the larger trajectory of a society going from rural to urban. Another optical illusion is perhaps at work here when we try to understand Karachi. We think that there is a link between urban development and management and conflict and crime. But “social structures are supposed to change from the traditional to the modern,” says Gazdar. “Institutions are supposed to transition from the informal to the formal. Cities are sometimes seen as sites where these three things happen together,” he adds. So much so, that people often confuse the three sets of change as being one. But they happen unevenly. And that is why we constantly feel the ground is moving beneath our feet, that we live in a runaway city that is going nowhere.