‘Planning paradigm of city now fuelled by global capital’

[Naveed Yaseen]

Karachi Strategic Development Plan-2020 has completely changed the planning paradigm of the city, noted architect and town planner Arif Hasan has said.

Delivering his keynote address at a seminar titled: “Karachi our city: visioning for an urban revolution,” he said that the planning paradigm of Karachi city was now fuelled by global capital. “You have the concept of public-private partnership in which public sector is totally subservient to private sector,” he said.

The seminar was organised by Shehri-CBE and the Department of Architecture and Planning of NED University of Engineering and Technology at its city campus.

“The city has now reached a stage where it can’t grow anymore,” Hasan observed.

Hasan said that Karachi Strategic Development Plan-2020 has been prepared in a totally different paradigm in which subsidy for health and education has been slashed. He said that the plan has been made in accordance with the concept of structural adjustment amidst market economy and devaluation.

“I call this new paradigm a neo-liberal urban development paradigm,” he said. “The protagonists of the new paradigm want to transform Karachi into a world class city with iconic architecture and high-rise buildings as opposed to upgraded settlements; flyovers and elevated expressways as opposed to traffic management and planning; and removing poverty from the city centres to the periphery to improve the image of the city so as to promote DFIs,” he said. “Global capital was until recently desperately looking for space,” he added.

The repercussions of the new paradigm, he said, were rich-poor divide, gated communities, removal of hawkers and closing of multi-class public space while land use was becoming subject to land value.

Arif Hasan further said that 75 per cent of Karachiites work in informal sector and unemployment rate here was 17.56 per cent, adding: “There is a major change in family structure”.

He said that planning has to respect the ecology and the natural environment of the area in which the city was located.

“Karachi is a very fragile city. You can bring it to its knees in four five days as happened after the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto,” he said.

But despite that it happens to be one of the best planned cities in South Asia although, he cautioned, Karachiites might not be living in one of the best planned South Asian cities after five or six years.

“Planning is fundamentally a political act and is determined on the basis of ideology or as a compromise between powerful interest groups. The nature of political relationship between the rulers and the government determines planning priorities,” he explained, saying: “There has to be an understanding between good laws and bad laws”.

He said that Karachi became a high-density, multi-ethnic and multi-class city after Pakistan came into being in 1947 as hundreds of thousands of people migrated from various parts of India to this city but now it has been reduced to an ethnic sprawl.

Farhan Anwar, an urban planner associated with Shehri-CBE, said that Karachi happens to be a very de-centralised city with as many as 21 civic agencies, adding: “Karachi is a city under various stresses and one of the stresses is phenomenal population growth”.

He said that the planning process in Karachi has failed because of absence of continuity, absence of an implementing and financing mechanism, as well as absence of stakeholders’ consultation. None of the planning documents in Karachi, he added, got legal sanctions. He said that the city faces a crisis of non-coordination and distress and “institutional corruption and meaningful space for consultation”.

It was a lively discussion on housing and urban utilities and transportation and recreational development.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=193879