Housing Karachi's Poor: Look up. Because that is where Karachi is headed

This refers to densification, and not necessarily ‘progress’.

KARACHI:

Are we some kind of garbage that you want to dump us on the outskirts, asks the woman from Lyari. “Why don’t you give us places to live in Defence, Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Gulshan-e-Maymar?”

She’s got a point, and many people like her agree: why should they move out to the peripheries of Karachi just because it’s getting too congested in the centre of the city?  “Karachi cannot expand any more,” adds urban expert Arif Hasan. It has to go up.

He and the woman from Lyari are talking about one thing: densification. They were commenting on it in a documentary, Karachi Rising, which was screened on Friday at NED University for the launch of a new IIED report on land ownership.



People want to live in the city and not in the suburbs. “Families want to live closer to work,” says Hasan, explaining factors driving densification. Poor people with informal jobs (such as cooks and cleaners) tend to live close to where they work in katchi abadis. And generally, those with office jobs have to travel long distances to get to work.

It is not surprising that people also want to stay close to their communities, neighbourhoods where they grew up. As a young man put it, if he is in his neighbourhood where he grew up, 400 people would come to his funeral. But if he moved to say Taiser Town, only 10 would come.

This is also cheaper. A study found that 2,000 women from three urbanized villages on the outskirts, for example, travel up to four hours a day just to reach the south zone of Karachi where their work is located. They spend Rs90 a day on transport.

The illustrations show how densification develops. SOURCE: KARACHI RISING

It thus makes much more sense for people to invest in motorcycles. A young man who lives in Surjani explained that it takes him 30 minutes to travel back and forth on his motorcycle - a journey that takes two hours by bus. So far in 2013, Karachi has 1.4 million motorcycles. It doesn’t help that there is no mass transit. Women won’t use motorcycles because they are dangerous and not culturally acceptable.



“Over the past several decades, new satellite towns were developed in the anticipation that they would be linked to the city centre and new industrial zones,” says Prof. Noman Ahmed of NED. But the poor don’t want to live here because there isn’t a proper transport network, for one. The government has to help them pay for housing in the dense areas and bring the katchi abadies into its net so that proper homes are built.

Given these preferences (proximity, cost, less suffering), Karachi is growing more dense: 17,325 people per square kilometre. The private sector has stepped in to cater to this demand. But much of this development is informal (read katchi abadi).

People are thus building one-unit houses in these unplanned settlements in the congested parts of the city. They prefer this, because they can expand or build up as their families grow. They can use parts of the house for commercial purposes as well.



But these structures don’t follow the building control authority rules. The high-rises are built on shallow foundations and in an earthquake they will collapse, warns Hasan. They don’t have proper ventilation and aren’t built to properly allow light in. Plus these housing units are becoming smaller and smaller in the dense parts of Karachi so they are more affordable. This leads to immense congestion, which Hasan warned will naturally have its own social problems.



But more than anything else, these dense high-rises in katchi abadies don’t have lifts. The elderly and children find it hard to make it up and down which means that they are cooped up all day.

At the end of the day, the question is whether the elected representatives and bureaucrats feel that poor deserve help to get a roof over their heads. Pro-poor or social housing is the answer to many of Karachi’s problems. But unless something is done soon, it will all be downhill from here.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 15^th, 2013.