Karachi 2060
The road to the city of the future: evictions, demolitions and land reclamation.
MAY 16, 2023
“WHO WOULDN’T WANT A SKYLINE IN KARACHI, YAAR?”
WHEN: December 2022
WHERE: An under-construction development on land reclaimed from the Arabian Sea, Defence Housing Authority, Phase-VIII extension, Karachi
The apartment I was being shown did not exist, but no matter — until some decades ago, the ground beneath us didn’t either. On Google Earth, you can see this coastal appendage mutate over time, lengthening and fattening: Little rectangular plots divide and multiply amid fading foliage, extending an expensive Karachi neighborhood, pushing back the Arabian Sea. Inside the apartment that did not yet exist — we were inside a temporary model unit — the sales associate clacked past a six-person dining table to the far end of the living room.
“And here, you have a floor-to-ceiling oceanfront view,” she said brightly. I nodded appreciatively at the blank wall.
Later, we climbed up to the roof of the sales office and watched the construction taking place along the water’s edge. A paraglider swooped over mounds of upturned earth; a black kite dodged the long arm of a tower crane. The sea was pockmarked with distant trawlers. Ground broke on the first of 19 towers last year; when the project is completed, by the end of 2025, this sales office — including the model apartment we just toured — will be dismantled: Its glossy floors and gilded chandeliers exist only to pitch high-end vertical living to deep-pocketed Pakistanis. Alina, whose job it is to sell this dream, grew up in Dubai and is afraid of heights.
“I’d consider it, maybe, if someone gave me the penthouse,” she said, with a shrug.
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In Karachi, facts are always in flux. The city is home to 15 million people— or 20, or 30, depending on which account convinces you. It has long been touted as one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, but preliminary census data indicates a possible downtick in population in recent years, findings that will no doubt be hotly contested in coming months. It is a city of opportunity: Like New Yorkers, most Karachi-wallahs are originally from somewhere else, drawn like moths to the metropolis.
Still, to appreciate the current contestation over Karachi, take any small stretch of land — say, along the city’s coastline, which is 90 or 48 or 27 kilometers long, based on whom you cite — and watch it morph before your eyes, like an optical illusion, depending on who is telling its story.
It is a city of danger: Last year, more than 78,000 vehicles and 30,000 mobile phones were snatched at gunpoint; dozens of people were killed when they resisted. (Most people in Karachi can relate multiple genres of mugging stories: absurdist comedy, thriller, tragedy.) A hundred years ago, it was no more than a cluster of small fishing villages. Seventy-five years ago, it was the capital of the new state of Pakistan, welcoming hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighboring India. Today, it is violently remaking itself into a city of the future, through evictions, demolitions and land reclamation
[Read: The Dispossession of District Six]
All cities contain multitudes; this is not a particularly astute observation. Still, to appreciate the current contestation over Karachi, take any small stretch of land — say, along the city’s coastline, which is 90 or 48 or 27 kilometers long, based on whom you cite — and watch it morph before your eyes, like an optical illusion, depending on who is telling its story.
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The developer of this particular gated community is the scion of a United Arab Emirates-based Pakistani magnate, with business concerns older than Pakistan itself. Previously, he oversaw his family’s textile operations in Tanzania. This is the company’s first project in Karachi, but it’s done this sort of coastal construction before, in Jumeirah Lake Towers, a district in Dubai studded with artificial lakes. “I remember that then Dubai was just a desert with sand dunes,” the elder tycoon told media while announcing the Karachi project. “But today Dubai is full of life.” As we sat in his office, large windows overlooking 110 acres of reclaimed land, the son made a similar appeal to vibrancy: “Who wouldn’t want a skyline in Karachi, yaar? Don’t you feel sad landing into Karachi, seeing nothing?”
Landing into the city from an airplane assumes a particular class of resident, of course. On more than one occasion during my visit I was reminded of the housing shortfall in Karachi, that it exceeds 1.2 million units, as if to underscore the project’s dire need — a figure I couldn’t verify independently but don’t find outlandish, given a projected nationwide shortage of 20 million by 2025. But the market is also shockingly skewed: Only 1 percent of new stock each year caters to the bottom two-thirds of the country. I pointed this out to the developer after he invoked the housing crisis, that most Karachi-wallahs can’t afford to buy what he is building, have never landed into Karachi.
“Well, yes,” he backtracked. “But I’m only looking for 3,000 buyers.”
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My cousin who manages a pop star I am not familiar with had launched a clothing line with said star’s wife; their first exhibition was taking place at the celebrity’s apartment next door, in another waterfront development, this one built by a subsidiary of the real estate company that erected the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. Unlike other coastal cities in the region, such as Dubai or Mumbai, Karachi hasn’t been home to many high-rises: It has few buildings taller than 150 meters. (By comparison, Mumbai has hundreds.)
“If everyone will die, then why would you want to live?” the developer quipped, cracking up his entourage.
It took us a while to enter the complex; the guards at the gates had to painstakingly check and note our IDs. Upstairs, the pop star’s wife was effusively apologetic. “They’ve become extra strict with visitors since that boy’s death last summer,” she explained. A young man had plummeted to his end from an apartment on the 17th floor; police suspected murder, a fight among friends, a Saturday-night rager gone awry. The apartment’s owner, an old lady in Canada, had reportedly been renting the place out on Airbnb. The pop star’s wife had grown up in a different part of the country and on a diet of gnarly Karachi stories — cellphone snatchings, carjacking, target killings in the city once touted as the world’s most dangerous — so she told me she is glad for the extra layers of security, especially since her husband travels frequently and she’s always racing after her two small sons. More so than the ocean and the private beach, it is the promise of uninterrupted access to water and electricity and other amenities, of the complex as its own self-sufficient world, that drew her to this corner of the city. In fact, terrified her kids will topple over the edge of the building, she keeps the curtains closed on that ocean view. As a guest slipped out onto the balcony, she began distracting her toddler.
“There’s nothing here, there’s nothing here,” she sang in a silly voice.
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By 2060, if sea erosion continues apace, most of Karachi could drown.
“If everyone will die, then why would you want to live?” the developer quipped, cracking up his entourage. I’d wanted to know if the city’s increasingly apparent climate vulnerability had dampened interest in the project. He shook his head. Although it is little more than a nub in the ground, most of the apartments in the first tower, with its promised sea-facing gym and infinity pool and round-the-clock concierge, have already been purchased, the buyers either local investors parking money in a passive, profitable asset that they can later sell off or overseas Pakistanis toying with the idea of returning home for longer stretches of time. “People here are crazy: Whenever there’s a storm, they brave police cordons and batons so they can flock to the coast,” the developer said. “Just to see: Did someone drown or not?”
In his entourage that day was a local politician, the former representative from my constituency. He nodded vigorously. “When there were bomb blasts all over the city, they would do the same, clamber over all the containers,” he said. He’d survived an assassination attempt some years ago, six bullets in his torso after a trip to our local supermarket.
Someone else in the entourage, an adviser or an assistant perhaps, leaned toward me. “Be positive,” she said, disappointed by my doom-mongering. “Be optimistic.”
“THEY CALL US UNWASHED BUT THIS IS THEIR FILTH”
WHEN: February 2023
WHERE: The former fishing village of Gizri; various phases of the Defence Housing Authority; Gizri Creek; the sea wall at Dou Darya
On a Saturday morning, about a kilometer away from the new waterfront project, Hussain Dorai and I clambered onto the sea wall at Dou Darya — “two seas” in Persian, as the spot is colloquially known — and dangled our feet over the buffer of rocks below. Hussain chacha — “uncle,” a common form of address for older men — is a longtime member of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, a collective that has long agitated against the slow throttling of fishers’ livelihoods. As the coastline has developed, spawning private commercial and residential properties and high-security installations such as ports and military bases, indigenous fishers have found their access to water increasingly restricted. Hussain chacha lives in Gizri, a neighborhood around 10 kilometers away from Dou Darya; long before Karachi was a city, Gizri was a fishing village, home to some of the region’s oldest inhabitants. Today only a few dozen of those households remain. Only two have their own boats, Dorai says.
I’d picked up Hussain chacha from his house in Gizri, on a street near phool wali gali — “alley of flowers” — and we drove through streets lined with mansions and the occasional mosque, first stopping at Gizri Creek, where local fishers used to dock their boats. “This was all jungle,” he reminisced. “The army carried out training exercises in the wilderness here; herders let their buffaloes and goats forage freely. There were no roads — all these houses, they didn’t exist. You could dump a body here and no one would find it for months.” This stretch of the city, once largely carpeted by mangroves, began to be developed after 1980, when the army chief running the country, Ziaul Haq, created the Defence Housing Authority. Initially created to develop housing for retired military personnel, the DHA amassed great power, in tandem with the growing commercial interests of the military. Today it is one of the largest real estate developers in the country, with a majority of its plots occupied by civilians. (It has a 15 percent stake in the new waterfront project, local developers say.) In Karachi, it is now its own fiefdom, existing outside the city’s regular municipal governance structures.
Before Dou Darya, Hussain chacha and I stopped in a mosque parking lot by the edge of the creek. Across the water, a line of tousled mangroves; on this side, a wedding banquet hall called Mangrove Lawn. He scanned the DHA watchtower, where armed personnel sometimes ask for identification, but it looked empty. “We can be here,” he said out loud, as if he were reassuring himself. “We’re not doing anything wrong.”
Across the creek, beyond the mangroves and our line of sight, lay the city’s industrial zone, studded with oil refineries and pharmaceutical companies, among others. What we could see was a bridge: This was where a major pipeline carrying oil to the other end of the city, where two major ports are located, crossed the creek. When it was constructed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Gizri fishers were forced to relocate their jetty farther south: Their wooden sailboats couldn’t pass under the bridge. But then, at that new docking site, the DHA created a dining club where rich members could park their personal yachts and sailboats. (“Where in Karachi can you escape from the mad traffic, crowded places and eating joints, spilling with people and nagging beggars,” the club’s website reads.)
“Our forefathers would come here on foot, carrying nets on their shoulders,” Hussain chacha said, peering at the water. “Then came cycles, then rickshaws; now you have wagons. There is convenience now, but we can no longer access our waters.”
[Read: The Law of the Sea Needs a Rewrite]
The water in the creek looked sludgy. As Karachi has expanded, its natural drainage systems have become choked with waste; moreover, the Gizri Creek outfall, fed by the seasonal Malir River, has been reduced from a width of 1.5 kilometers to 20 meters as the DHA has expanded. This often leads to nearby flooding during the summer monsoons.
The Fisherfolk Forum has repeatedly locked horns with the DHA, demanding the right to access the creek and a place to dock their boats. Back at his house, Hussain chacha showed me photos from past protests, carefully wrapped in plastic. “We did reach an agreement at one point; we were promised a jetty there, on that island where the mangroves are,” he said. In the past, successful mobilizations by fishing communities have led to sweeping legislative change. “But I don’t know what happened: if they reneged or our leaders never held their feet to the fire …”
He squinted at the shrubby patch in the middle of the water. “They said they would build us a bridge to get to it.”
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To get to Dou Darya, we looped around the thumb of land that is the newest extension of the DHA, past the country clubs and wedding venues, past the sprawling golf course, past an abandoned high-rise complex that’s under investigation for corruption. Many plots of land are still undeveloped. A few months ago, when the city ran out of gas, Hussain chacha came here to collect fallen branches for firewood. A security guard, suspecting him of filching material from a half-built house, apprehended him. “He pushed me to the ground,” he said. “Any two-taka person thinks he can interrogate us now: What are you doing, why are you here?”
Hussain chacha’s neighbor Hanif had joined us. “The sea would come all the way till here,” Hanif said, as we drove through the reclaimed land. “It still might, if they hadn’t built that wall there.”
“What will that wall do if there’s an earthquake?” Hussain chacha scoffed. He used the word jhatka, “jolt.”
“Don’t say that, may Allah have mercy on us.”
“Oh, there will be one, didn’t you see what happened in Turkey? They’re Muslims, too.”
At Dou Darya, you could make out the ruffled contours of Bundal Island in the distance, the latest flashpoint in the battle for the city. Since 2006, various governments — in partnership with private interests — have tried to develop the mangrove-dense island into a megacity, touting Dubai as inspiration. For now, Hussain chacha said, it is one of the few areas where fishers can catch fish in relative peace, without being shooed away or detained by officials. Still, to get there, you need a boat, and the fishers of Gizri have no nearby place to dock.
“So where do you fish now?” I asked Hussain chacha.
He stood up from the sea wall and dusted off his hands. “Let me show you.”
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We parked the car on the easternmost stretch of the public beach — walk any farther east and security guards from the waterfront developments will start shaking their rifle butts at you, signaling that this is private land. As we swung ourselves over the sea wall and into the sand, I asked about the fishing vessels I could see out on the ocean. Those, Hussain chacha explained, were commercial boats, owned by contractors who demand a large cut of sales. “Those can withstand a great deal of wear and tear,” he said, “but we can’t afford them. Our vessels, if the wind changes, crash and splinter against these rocks.” He paused. “We are poor people, we have to take care of our things.”
He walked farther out and pointed to a mound in the sand. “So now this is our boat.”
I peered at what seemed to be a large pile of Styrofoam scraps covered in fishnet and rope, about 7 feet long and 2 feet high. “This is — your boat?”
Hussain chacha stood on it. “Yes, one of us came up with the idea after our boats kept getting damaged. The material floats; if one of us falls into the water, the others just pull him back up. And the rocks do nothing to it.” Against my will, I imagined the boat — the flotation device — unraveling in the ocean, the scraps and fish bobbing away.
“You’d be surprised by how far out this goes; look, there’s another one there.” He climbed down and kicked the sand. “We bury the oars, but this no one steals or confiscates — ”
“ — because they think it’s trash,” I said, realizing why I had never noticed them before.
“Because they think it’s trash,” Hussain chacha affirmed.
“THOSE TREES LOOK LIKE CORPSES”
WHEN: December 2022
WHERE: McDonald’s, Nishan-e-Pakistan monument, Sea View beach
Architect Marvi Mazhar was having trouble breathing that morning — “Adult-onset asthma,” she wheezed — so we flagged down one of those skeletal dune buggies to survey the length of the beach, the sort you see commandeered by teenagers skipping school. We stepped down into the sand from behind the old McDonald’s, a rare planned entry point where you can walk toward the water without scaling a wall. It was an early December day, 7 a.m. or so: blurry horizon, the sun behind a film of smog. Marvi took the wheel.
Civic alarm has thwarted unchecked commercialization of the coast in the past, but like the trash collector on the beach, this is an unending task, a thankless game of whack-a-mole.
We trundled over broken sandals and discarded syringes, the wind whipping our hair. This stretch of the coast, known as Sea View and administered for the most part by the DHA, extends as a sandy beach for about 4 kilometers before ending abruptly where land reclamation begins. Closer to the waves, two tractor grapples were scraping trash from the sand, a heroically Sisyphean task, arranging it into little mounds that municipal trucks would later whisk away to landfills. Meanwhile, the city’s wastewater — nearly 500 million gallons per day, most of it untreated — flowed toward the sea, through seasonal rivers and nullahs that effectively function as sewage drains. We came to a halt before one such rivulet of sludge.
“We might need a tetanus shot after this,” Marvi muttered grimly. She pressed down on the accelerator.
[Read: The Noisy, Destructive Birds Overwhelming Brussels]
There is a long history in Karachi of a particular kind of public-minded citizen, curmudgeonly but dogged, the kind who pens furious letters to the editor or sues the municipality over a pothole or pesters a recalcitrant bureaucracy with repeated Right to Information requests. Civic alarm has thwarted unchecked commercialization of the coast in the past, but like the trash collector on the beach, this is an unending task, a thankless game of whack-a-mole. There is a yearslong court case against the dumping of raw sewage into the sea, filed by a coalition of environmental groups. Ongoing public interest litigation has stalled further land reclamation — for now.
“You can see here that the sea has gone way back,” Marvi said. “That’s because when the new shipping terminal was being built, all that sand was dumped here.” That terminal, Hutchison Ports Pakistan, was inaugurated in 2018. Despite reports that dredging and land reclamation are altering wave patterns and accelerating coastal erosion, the impact of new coastal construction has not been studied closely. “That swamp there, those patches of grass? That’s only there because of the sewage,” Marvi said. Someone had set up a dart game near it, balloons and plastic toys stuck into a mound of sand.
As we drove east, Marvi pointed away from the water, toward Nishan-e-Pakistan, a monument built seven years ago, ostensibly to commemorate the resilience of the people of Karachi. It was deserted, but the previous week it had hosted an international arms exhibition. “Look at this continuous boundary wall: It has no relationship to the sea,” she said. “And this entire site is a ticketed space; it’s only open for a few hours every day.” This is Marvi’s pet peeve: the proliferation of restaurants and parks and other concrete structures along the beach that, even as they encroach on a public space, remain closed off from it. “They think of the sea as their backyard,” she fumed. “Imagine.”
We left the buggy and climbed back onto the cement through an opening in the boundary, jumping over an open sewer and through a grove of desiccated palms — a vanity project by a local politician, she said, attempting to evoke the promenades in Dubai. “They look like corpses,” she said disgustedly. “No way these trees will take in our climate.”
She shook her head. “I think calling all this gentrification is selling it short.”
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Later, I walked this same stretch of beach by myself, past young men making TikToks and shy couples brushing hands, past school teenagers skiving off to race with buggies and horses on the sand. I remembered a story told by a veteran urban planner: He once spotted a couple arguing bitterly on the beach, so bitterly that he felt compelled to intercede. “Oh, we’ve come here precisely for this,” the husband explained. “We live in a joint family, so there’s no privacy at home.” I grew up in an older part of town, in a house so far away from the sea that I never really developed any meaningful relationship with the water, despite having lived here all my life. When I did venture near the coast, it was in private huts on secluded beaches an hour or so outside the city. It is safe to say that most people who might invest in a new oceanfront apartment did not come here, to this public beach: It was too dirty, too crowded, too full of the masses.
Growing up, more and more of my friends had moved into new constructions closer to the sea. Even the school I went to moved there eventually. I remained the kid from the uncool part of town. But recently, when I looked for my house on an old map of Karachi from the early ’50s, I was caught off guard to find the area marked by villages and stone quarries. How quickly the new becomes old, how quickly we forget.
On the beach, a drinks vendor had set up plastic chairs in the water: They faced the sea, all empty except one, an oddly poetic arrangement. A wandering ascetic came up to me; he blessed me and pressed a small red stone into my hand. If I paid for his journey back to the shrine, he promised he would pray for me.