As a pedagogical experiment in thinking about the southern city and the urban through a creative and critical lens, the Karachi Urban Lab’s (KUL) mission is to nurture and develop ideas that enable explorations and connections between research, teaching, public policy dialogue and advocacy. The KUL provides an interdisciplinary, collaborative platform of research; opportunities for networking across disciplines and geographies, locally and internationally; holding events and generating publications around the urgent urban issues and associated politics of our times.

The KUL’s mission is also to promote urban-rural development that is sustainable with a focus on infrastructures, land transformations, climate change, violence, gender and housing. The KUL’s mission is supported by a group of accomplished academics and practitioners who represent multidisciplinary backgrounds. Karachi and the wider region of Sindh and Balochistan, provide a critical lens to reflect on how the rural-urban is being shaped, imagined and contested; where the dynamics of urban planning, ecology, infrastructural reorganization, socio-spatial transformations and political struggles over resources and the refashioned aesthetics of nature unfold at various scales.

The KUL is housed within the Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts at IBA, and its work and research output are supported by grants