Safe City

The word 'safe' conjures up many different images in the mind. When spoken in the context of cities, many things come into play. In a complex, bursting-at-the-seams cosmopolitan vulnerable to climate change city like Karachi, the first thing that pops up is the law and order situation, which has been good and bad cyclically, and the plight of the citizens during inclement weather, as they are experiencing these days due to the extraordinarily strong monsoon spell.

However that is not the only factor that is covered under the umbrella of the word safety; city planners know well the saying that a safe city is that where the most vulnerable member of the society feels safe. For instance a child, or an elderly citizen, or someone who is physically challenged.

In a city a citizen has the right to expect safety from health hazards like piles of rubbish surrounding them, or water borne diseases carried through the municipal supply lines, or open nullahs and gutters, or unhealthy levels of noise and air pollution. One also expects to feel safe in the knowledge that if an accident occurs, or a fire breaks out, or the electricity pole is sparking, someone will be within reach to hear the complaint and redress it.

Here the emphasis is on redressal and not just information dissemination that had been taken upon themselves by many tech and social media citizens through the creation of platforms that send out traffic and other advisory before even Google services were available. The way they worked was through websites linked to Facebook pages, and then the information would be disseminated through WhatsApp groups.

So far so good. However, in a country with as large a teledensity footprint as we have, it would be an opportunity lost to not take advantage of it for actual service delivery for the benefit of the citizens. The growth in the number of smartphones makes the advantage of such usage very obvious.

Such connectivity benefits work best in congested large cities because the service delivery becomes accessible to a larger number of people. Karachi is a case in point. Due to its many complexities of size, multiplicity of problems, resource constraint that can never keep pace with the needs, and official jurisdictional tug of wars, it is the best place to test out innovative solutions. There is much truth in the claim, by Karachiites, that if something can work here, customising it for other cities will be much easier.

It is in this context that the announcement of the launch an app, Alertli, was announced recently at a 'Safe City' conference held with the support of the city's electricity utility, K-Electric, which had supported its development and beta testing. As explained by the founder, "Alertli is a socially powered navigation platform with Locational AI offering personalised routes, real time local, social insights and community driven features."

The presence of all stakeholders, from relevant government departments responsible for local governance to waste management and disaster response at the 'Safe Karachi' Conference was very promising because rarely have all the bodies for the management of the city's affairs been seen at a public forum, openly discussing and acknowledging their own shortcomings and challenges.

In a clear departure from becoming a mutual appreciation forum, they appeared open to critique as well as recommendations coming from sectoral experts and members of the public when they shared their departmental plans for making the city safe and manageable.

Karachi has been steadily slipping down the Livability Index and efforts by federal, provincial and local actors, through bilateral and multilateral assistance, are yet to reach a critical mass. The Conference focussing on urban resilience was the need of the hour. In the wake of climate change impacts and environmental degradation, the host of problems Karachi faces, like urban heat exacerbated by poor zoning, as well as the material used for infrastructure, and the inability to cope with proper waste disposal all comes to head during the monsoons which leads to urban flooding and its ancillary problems.

However, there was a consensus that in a city of the size of Karachi, citizen and private sector engagement is essential to get a handle on the problems. Whatever pockets of success that the city can boast of, be it in the field of increasing the green cover, access to healthcare and educational facilities skill development, or coming together in times of disaster, it is the pooling together of the financial and philanthropic resources to deal with them by the citizens that has helped the government.

Some of the best run initiatives of ambulances services, hospitals and schools, shelter, even recreational, edutainment and infotainment facilities are those run on Public Private Partnership basis, either by NGOs or through Boards made up of experts in management drawn from the corporate sector, who have sought the inputs from academia and think tanks. This has been done either through institutional support or direct adoption of parks, schools and hospitals. This is a successful model that needs to be strengthened by becoming responsive to the citizens' needs.

If, as announced, it takes an app to make all city functionaries responsive to citizens' needs by connecting all the relevant departments, then this is something that needs to come into play on a day before yesterday basis. This will need the departments concerned to also build the capacity of their own personnel and systems to respond to the alerts issued through so citizen confidence can be built. Information dissemination in tandem with an appropriate response, whether through the rescue and response mechanism, or redressal of issues arising out of civic injustices due to lack of planning, need to be ironed out.

The journey of taking Karachi from one of the 'Least Liveable' to a 'Safe City' is going to be an arduous one, but it cannot be embarked upon only with dependence on the government. Citizens' initiatives and suggestions for improvements must be met halfway by the government, and they must be allowed to cut through the bureaucratic red tape to test their pilots; then it is the duty of the government to scale the implementation.