Vertical expansion — at a cost

CAA's plans to allow building of towers around the Benazir Bhutto Airport is bound to have impact on the environment.

Opening up land for the construction of high rise buildings is, surprisingly, viewed by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for one, as being of prime importance despite the continuing economic downturn, which has knocked everyone for a financial six. In the guise of providing work in the construction sector, it is considering allowing the building of towers over the currently stipulated height of 500 feet, at a distance of eight kilometres from Benazir Bhutto International Airport, Islamabad.

If approved, both by the CAA and the federal government, this reduction of ‘aerodrome space’, from 15 to eight kilometres is expected to become CAA policy in the vicinity of airports throughout the country. This has the potential to completely change the face of cities such as Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the latter particularly as it is host to vast tracts of substandard housing where people live in overcrowded squalor. The intention behind this move is not, however, humanitarian, for, as far as can currently be ascertained, rehousing plans are not on the cards.

Those to benefit will naturally be the CAA itself, developers with an eye on profit and other vested interests including, in the case of Islamabad, the consortium behind the stalled construction of a 37-storey, five-star hotel, rearing over 700 feet into the rarified air near Jinnah Convention Centre. Islamabad’s Blue Area could also undergo even more upheaval than it already has in the recent past, when the new road system was under construction.

The indisputable geological fact that Islamabad is situated in a region prone to earthquakes — think Margalla Towers — does not appear, at least at this early stage, to have been given the consideration it most surely deserves. Although, as is the case far too often, reassuring sops will, no doubt, be handed out at the appropriate time.

The vertical expansion of cities does, admittedly, reduce their environmental impact on agricultural land, yet there is still an incredibly high cost to pay in terms of atmospheric and psychological disturbance. Towers block traps and soak up heat during the day, releasing it at night, thus creating ‘hot spots’ of their very own climate change; unless constructed using ‘green’ initiatives throughout, they also gobble up vast amounts of costly energy — energy the country does not have — to maintain reasonably acceptable living temperatures inside, pump out massive volumes of sewage into below standard systems which cannot cope and are not exactly conducive to the best of human health either.

This under discussion ‘relaxation’ of rules could be viewed as a move towards the supposed modernisation and upgradation of cityscapes throughout the country yet. If approved, it is liable to speed up the already rapid degeneration of badly served urban centres of population in which people perpetually struggle to survive, in what has come to resemble a world gone mad and in which monetary gain, no matter the cost in human and environmental terms, is the only religion to follow.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 26^th, 2011.