Articles
Karachi: The Housing Imperative
Thirty six point seven percent of Karachi’s land is currently utilised for residential purposes: 27 percent has been developed formally and 8.1 percent informally. The development process for the rest (which is 1.6 percent) is...
Karachi’s Demographic Change and its Social Repercussions
The most important statistics in a population census are related to the social indicators of the age group of between 15 and 24. This is because this age group represents both the present and the...
Motorbike Transit
Since 1989, mass transit options for Karachi have been studied to death and every time the same options surfaced. Only their capital and operating costs increase. Two technical options surface. One is the light rail....
Poorer than Before
Since 1970 I have been involved with development related issues, both at the national and international level. This involvement has been in land, housing, physical and social infrastructure and research into the dynamics of urban...
Berlin Impressions: Occidentalism?
15 March 2011: Berlin Tegel Airport: Going back to Karachi after spending 11 days as Kamran’s guest at the Wissenschaftskolleg. It was not my first visit to Berlin but since it was a long one,...
The Conflict between the Carbon-free and the Neo-liberal City
Presentation for the Future of Cities Conference, Chatham House, London, To achieve a low carbon or a carbon-free city, it is necessary to reduce green house gases. It is well-established that this can be done...
Structural Reform and Social Values
The creation of a more tolerant society in Pakistan (and which does not necessarily mean liberal) is simply not possible without removing the causes of the country’s under-development, increasing poverty and a growing sense of...
The Hawkers of Karachi
Newspaper articles, some NGOs, statements by city government representatives and police officials, periodically express concern at the traffic and pedestrian movement related problems caused by hawkers in Karachi. These hawkers are of different kinds. There...
A Town Under Water
Muhammad Iqbal Memon, DCO Dadu invited me to visit Khairpur Nathan Shah to “advise” him on its “rehabilitation”. In the briefing held in Dadu on 10 October 2010, and attended by Imran Zafar Laghari (the...
Floods and After
For a sustainable reconstruction of the physical and social infrastructure of flood ravaged Sindh, it is necessary to understand to what extent the damage caused by the flood is man-made. Some of the broad indicators...
Land and the Politics of Ethnicity
Politically motivated targeted killings, sectarian violence, forced occupation of other people’s property, illegal bulldozing of poor settlements, an increasing crime rate and an increasingly helpless and corrupt administration, are making Karachi ungovernable. There are many...
