Although the climate has admittedly always been hot and humid in cities like Karachi, increasingly hotter temperatures are exacerbating the impact of heat on informal, precariously employed outdoor workers such as street vendors, guards and rickshaw drivers, who must negotiate their right and access to shade at the everyday scale. Recalling Mike Davis’ radical, political claim that shade is an inalienable human right, this paper proposes that few people working in the outdoor spaces of the South Asian city today understand or experience shade in these terms. Rather shade is something that must be claimed, alongside other rights and entitlements. Moreover, shade alone is insufficient as it cannot reduce the exposure of bodies to harmful ambient radiations and overall thermal discomfort. This paper makes three broad propositions for outlining a theory for the social study of shade in the South Asian city. By paying closer attention to the ways that outdoor workers negotiate shade in Karachi, this paper opens up for analysis a wider spectrum of claims-making activity in changing South Asian urban climates. It places workers’ search for shade in the broader context of shade policing and urban management aimed at creating spatial as well as social order. Finally, this article emphasises key directions and questions for future research.
This article conceptualizes everyday processes of carbon embodiment and transplantation in informal settlements across Karachi, Pakistan. The authors explore these grounded carbon trajectories against the state’s carbon discourses and policies, highlighting the lacunae in the national (de)carbonization discourse particularly in the housing construction sector. In contrast, they look at grounded, unintended, and ad hoc practices of carbon embodiment and transplantation through the lens of the informal housing construction sector in urban Pakistan, drawing on several representative cases from extended fieldwork in Karachi during 2018–22. They examine how carbon is embodied and “transplanted” across spatial regions, intergenerational life courses, and the localized imaginaries of urban housing, through the everyday practices of residents (de/re)constructing and living in informal, patchworked houses. Against the backdrop of Karachi’s housing precarity, Abdallah and Macktoom observe peculiar temporal-material patterns that frame everyday carbon management for a large proportion of urban dwellers. They conceptually weave these cases together to speculate on patchwork housing processes, material redistributive practices, and carbon (dis)embodiment for populations lying beyond the state’s formal attempts at de-carbonization. They posit that understanding, accounting for, and upscaling the existing practices of patching, unpatching, and repatching carbon constitutes a critical lens to understand the smaller-scale yet more proximate and intense relations of carbon in under-documented cities like Karachi.
The essays in this Spotlight On collection speak to this question, with five essays written by established and emerging scholars who reflect on the impacts of rising heat in South Asia. Their essays address several critical issues pertaining to the unique challenges that rising temperatures pose for South Asia, and the harms imposed on poor, marginalized, and vulnerable inhabitants. These harms include direct and indirect impacts such as rise in old and new chronic disease burdens, worsening respiratory conditions, heat stress related injuries, displacement, and infrastructural damage
In this piece, using Karachi as a proxy for rapidly warming Southern cities, we examine various forms of ‘heat (in)action’ when heat is in action in the city. What do Heat Action Plans imply? How are the logistics and delegation of heat action formulated? And what is heat inaction? Situating these inquiries within anecdotal and empirical vignettes, we dissect the convoluted nature of Karachi’s urban thermopolitics (Staroseilski, 2014) to conceptualize several ‘logics of inaction’ (Sharman and Perkins, 2017; Dobson and Dempsey, 2021) around extreme heat in the city. In the state’s redistribution of the responsibility for managing heat onto a fragmented cacophony of stakeholders as the former’s strategy of ‘governance through inaction’ (Bjarnesen, 2023), we position urban heat and its impacts within the discursive and pragmatic framework of a thermopolitics that is evidently incapacitated and demonstrably farcical when it comes to managing heat.
Millennial Karachi is an “intense city” with compounding precarities of varying scales. The COVID-19 pandemic has added yet another layer of uncertainty. Through an engagement with the concept of the intense city, the pandemic’s regulation and hopeful prospects in the state’s new welfare policies are considered.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused an extraordinary disruption in the lives of people across Pakistan, including Karachi. Information about managing the pandemic and preventing its spread led to various types of restrictions for extended periods of time in the city. Different cross-sections of the society, including women, daily wage labourers, street vendors and domestic workers, were approached for feedback. This study explored the various types of social, economic and logistic challenges that were experienced by the vulnerable groups in Karachi. It also examined the various support programmes launched by the government to deal with the pandemic impacts. The study also reviewed the initiatives by various welfare organisations in providing relief to the poor and vulnerable people in different locations in the metropolis.
Every few years, Karachi floods during the summer monsoon. The flooding brings latent manoeuvrings by political actors looking to establish their hold over the city to the surface. Politicians, urban administrators, and relevant state and non-state institutions blame historical planning failures, informal and illegal constructions, institutional conflict, incapable municipal governance, and widespread corruption for the flooding. They move quickly to establish authority and consolidate power while offering ‘fixes’. Eviction drives against ‘illegal settlements’ built along storm-water drains, heavy taxes, fines, and demolitions of non-conforming constructions, institutional reforms, budget allocations, and project approvals for new infrastructure all happen at once. Once the emergency ceases, key players in urban politics – resident groups, community associations, political parties, municipal authorities, land developers, planners, international non-governmental organisations, and military institutions – start working on projects of accumulation and entrenchment, in preparation for the next crisis. In this paper, we look at the space–time of Karachi's certain and yet uncertain flooding crisis as a moment to study the politics of the maybe in the Pakistani megacity. Outlining marginal and affluent residents' lived experiences in a flooding city and relating their politics with governmental responses to immediate and possible future floods, we study the conditions of inhabitation, citizenship claims, and governmental relations in Karachi. We argue that the monsoon's expectant arrival becomes a locus for articulating and modulating different kinds of popular vernaculars, governmental practices, and political manoeuvrings for institutional and individual actors seeking profit and power in and through Karachi. The politics of the maybe hinges on actors entrenching their political positions without care, taking away any possibility for a shared, coherent worldview for all Karachiites. In conclusion, we argue that distant interests and logics of this politics of governance and inhabitation are inherently exploitative, threatening to pull apart the very city they thrive on.
The relationship between infrastructure development and intensifying climate crisis is generating new cycles of 24-hour risks in the urban global South. These risks are particularly severe in low-income neighbourhoods and informal settlements. They create complex microgeographies of risk, unfolding across time, space, multiple scales, and intersectionality, compounding gendered vulnerabilities. Complex interactions between risks and infrastructure development are overlooked in research and policy action at the urban scale. Research from Karachi and Nairobi points to opportunities to build resilient infrastructures that strengthen and support community networks and inclusion.
Extreme heat, altered precipitation patterns, and flooding events, exacerbated by climate change, are changing the nature of 24-hour risk cycles faced by low-income neighbourhoods and informal settlements in the global urban South. In cities such as Karachi (Pakistan) and Nairobi (Kenya), climatic changes interact with existing forms of urban violence, generating new and complex landscapes of visible and invisible risks for residents. In this IDS Working Paper, we set out a framework for understanding the dynamic and varied risks that are affecting cities in East Africa and South Asia. We are interested in the complex microgeographies of risk, as they unfold across time, space, and social identity, and their interplay between multiple scales as they cascade and compound vulnerabilities for low-income groups. For example, large-scale infrastructure planning aimed at ameliorating infrastructural degradation within the city may exacerbate harm and risk at the local level, especially for those living in insecure and underserved areas. In this rapidly transforming landscape of risks, how is the wellbeing of vulnerable populations ensured in the everyday context? In turn, infrastructures of climate repair involve maintenance practices in cities comprising complex interactions between humans, non-humans, and technologies for the purpose of making life tenable. This research project examines these in three low-income and informal settlements of Karachi, and in informal settlements affected by three major transport infrastructures in Nairobi. Through these foci, we explore everyday life on ‘standby’, the nature of ‘small’ agencies as speculative strategy and kinship networks as vital to embodying adaptive techniques. Evoking Tronto’s (2020) ethics of ‘caring for’ rather than ‘caring about’ and Simone’s (2004) conception of bodies as infrastructure, our investigation enables us to explore climate repair and adaptation at the bodily, communal, and city-wide scales. We focus on gendered labour performed in the service of maintaining wellbeing while holding onto the promise of the city.
This report presents findings from a large-scale, multi-country survey exploring the compounded effects of COVID-19 on heat exposure and vulnerability among low-income urban residents in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and Cameroon. Conducted in July and August 2020, the study surveyed 4,564 individuals and reveals how pandemic responses exacerbated existing vulnerabilities in low-income communities, particularly regarding access to electricity, water, and adequate housing. Funded by the UK’s ESRC/Global Challenges Research Fund and the Scottish Funding Council, the report underscores the need to reframe heat-health risk by integrating vulnerability and exposure into warning and response systems, beyond exceptional heat events.
The scoping study "Designed to Fail? Heat Governance in Urban South Asia: The Case of Karachi" explores Karachi's heat governance challenges in the context of rising temperatures and socio-spatial inequalities. It highlights how inadequate infrastructure, poor planning, and chronic heat exposure exacerbate vulnerabilities, calling for a comprehensive and context-specific approach to urban heat governance. Offering insights into the roles of state and non-state actors, climate data trends, and policy gaps, the study emphasizes a relational understanding of heat, urban planning, and vulnerability in the Global South. Part of the project Cool Infrastructures: Life with Heat in the Off-Grid City, the study was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the Global Challenges Research Fund, with additional support from the Scottish Funding Council’s Global Challenges Research Fund.
In Pakistan today, infrastructure is a site of renewed political attention. In this working paper, we propose that these large-scale infrastructure projects constitute a vision of fast-tracking Pakistan’s grid modernity where the ‘grid’ – as an infrastructural object and as a space of violence - indexes a relationship to land, ecology and a politics of (dis)connectivity with struggles for entitlements, rights and recognition. The grid assigns specific meanings to spaces – fences, lines, boundaries, parcels - to control the human/nonhuman social and physical worlds, and this instigates localized understandings of economic and social uncertainty. Through the twin analytics of land and energy, we see the grid as an object designed to facilitate flows as well as a powerful technology of statecraft or disciplinary rule that disentangles land and common-property resources from local social relations and reconfigures them as private property. Thus, the grid is a potent site for investigating a politics of power that incorporates the promise of socio-economic progress amid anxieties of social exclusion, ecological degradation and displacement.
Pakistan is home to diverse geographies of land displacement, which are accelerating in an era of rapid urban development. This paper summarises the findings and recommendations from a 28-month research project which charts - for the first time - the contemporary context of land displacement in urban Pakistan, through the lens of its largest city, Karachi.
پاکستان کے شہروں میں زمین اور گھر سے بے دخلی کے مختلف جغرافیے موجود ہیں۔ مقامی سطح پر یہ وہ سیاسی مقامات ہیں جن کی تشکیل تاریخی، معاشی اور سیاسی قوتوں نے کی ہے۔ اس دستاویز میں ۲۸ ماہ کے منصوبے کے نتائج اور سفارشات کا خلاصہ پیش کیا گیا ہے، جس میں پہلی بار شہری پاکستان میں زمین اور گھرسے بے دخلی کی تاریخ اور عصری تناظر کو تحقیقی اندازمیں پیش کیا گیا ہے اور اس کے سب سے بڑے شہر کراچی کے حوالے سے مطالعہ کیا گیا۔ کراچی کی آبادی ۱۶ ملین ہے جبکہ غیر سرکاری آبادی طور پر اس کی آبادی ۲۵ ملین ہے۔
In the past two decades of intensified mega-infrastructural and urban development projects in Karachi, an estimated 600,000 urban poor, low-income, working class and marginalized communities have been displaced with less than 33 percent of them receiving any form of resettlement or cash compensation. This report documents how land is governed and acquired for infrastructure and urban development projects; how land displacements mpact people’s lives and their communities; and how people resist displacement in Pakistan's largest metropolis. The findings emerge from a 24-month project covering 16 study sites in Karachi, called Land, Governance & the Gendered Politics of Displacement in Urban Pakistan, and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). What makes this present moment of land displacements and struggles particularly complex, is the interlocking of emergent neoliberal policies with colonial genealogies of managing and appropriating land, as well as post-Partition legacies of housing crisis and land informalization that dovetail today with the emergence of the courts as key sites of urban planning and governance in a bid to restore law and order in the city. Land displacements have severe consequences: loss of home, livelihoods, community, and social networks; engendering a permanent state of anxiety and uncertainty; increasing physical, social, and environmental vulnerabilities; compounding gender inequalities; and irrevocably damaging social and economic mobility. These effects are especially pernicious because displacement is not a one-time event. Displacement is an intensely traumatic and violent experience with differentiated impacts on men and women, and the wellbeing related consequences for those who have experienced displacement or are at risk of losing their land. The report also charts the complex, evolving and rich terrain of solidarities, protests, and grassroots activism that is gradually shaping resistance against land displacements in Karachi. We place this complex process of resistance in shifting atmospheres of hope, and expectation that can quickly dissolve into despair and waiting. These shifts epitomize the extensive labors of ordinary women and men who come together in given moments, to forge connections in their common struggles to achieve the same goal. The contestations and conflicts over displacement demonstrate how the right to land as a right to citizenship, remains differentiated and unacknowledged by the Pakistani state. With future displacements anticipated in the context of new urban planning, infrastructure development, and disaster risk management interventions in Karachi, we offer recommendations for addressing the exclusions that arise from land displacement.
This report is the final output of an ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) funded 10-month project. The Principal Investigator was Ms Abira Ashfaq, Lawyer & Visiting Faculty, Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts, IBA, and the Co-Investigator was Professor Nausheen H Anwar, Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts, IBA.
The project investigated how deep-seated inequalities in the distribution of economic, political, and social resources, influence migrants’ capacity for resilience in the face of forcible displacement. These inequalities and injustices are constructed along the lines of gender, minority status, citizenship, informality of labor, and rural geography, and are solidified through the use of both overt and tacit political violence in which the state itself is complicit. Overt violence is police high-handedness - unlawful stops, unreasonable use of force and extortion - and tacit forms of institutional violence may include the state's collusion with private interests, inaccessibility of justice systems, erasure from maps and records, and state abdication in service delivery. The report’s main findings are that political or institutional violence exacerbate vulnerability and impact a migrant group's capacity for resilience.
The report covers 10 study sites in Karachi - many are unplanned settlements that have emerged in the past decade on Karachi’s edges, and are a result of different kinds of migration trajectories. The report provides a constructive contribution for understanding some of the key dynamics that are shaping people's decisions to migrate to cities like Karachi, and the extraordinary difficulties they are facing not only in making such decisions, but what is happening to them as they find themselves ensconced in the city's spaces, where the temporariness of work and housing, disconnected infrastructures and exposure to institutional and political violence, make their lives increasingly precarious. A crucial point this report makes is, if the state does not acknowledge and engage positively with the new processes that are shaping ordinary lives and spaces in the city, then solutions to poverty and inequality will remain elusive.
This multi-authored article (2019) provides new insights into the politics of water provisioning in Karachi’s informal settlements, where water shortages and contaminations have pushed ordinary citizens to live on the knife edge of water scarcity. We turn our attention to the everyday practices that involve gendered insecurities of water in Karachi, which has been Pakistan’s security laboratory for decades. We explore four shifting security logics that strongly contribute to the crisis of water provisioning at the neighbourhood level and highlight an emergent landscape of ‘securitised water’. Gender maps the antagonisms between these security logics, so we discuss the impacts on ordinary women and men as they experience chronic water shortages. In Karachi, a patriarchal stereotype of the militant or terrorist-controlled water supply is wielded with the aim of upholding statist national security concerns that undermine women’s and men’s daily security in water provisioning whereby everyday issues of risk and insecurity appear politically inconsequential. We contend that risk has a very gendered nature and it is women that experience it both in the home and outside.
Based on seven years of fieldwork and ongoing engagements with Karachi’s periphery, this paper (2018) advances a new perspective on the agrarian-urban frontier as constitutive of a new value regime and politics in Pakistan.
Looking at border towns in Iran and Pakistan, this paper (2016) considers how mobile urban networks, infrastructures and flows of commodities stretch and coalesce in an age of intensified urbanization.
This multi-authored concept paper (2016) considers the complex nature of urbanization across the globe, and the seemingly insurmountable challenges of transforming urban futures that require multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder research efforts across diverse geographies.
The South Asian city is changing fast. There are more women in urban centers than ever before and they are joining the workforce, albeit more in the informal sector. But the benefits of urbanization do not accrue equally to men and women. Despite women’s need to travel within cities to access economic and educational opportunities, they are still habitually harassed for being out in public spaces. In this chapter (2018) that appears in the edited book Social Theories of Urban Violence in the Global South (Routledge), the authors consider the problems that women experience with mobility in Pakistan’s cities, as they challenge traditional gender roles.
The report is the final output of the Safe and Inclusive Cities Program (SAIC) project (2013 – 2016). The project has focused on the material and discursive drivers of gender roles and their relevance to configuring violent geographies specifically among 12 urban poor, lower-income, lower-middle income, neighborhoods of 3 cities: Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Islamabad. The project has investigated how frustrated gendered expectations may be complicit in driving different types of violence and how they may be tackled by addressing first, the material aspects of gender roles through improved access to infrastructure services and opportunities, and second, discursive aspects of gender roles in terms of public education and media. This report's findings are based upon approximately 2400 hundred questionnaire surveys, close to 60 ethnographic style interviews, participant observations, participatory photographic surveys, media monitoring, secondary literature review and some key informant interviews. The findings overwhelmingly point towards access to services and vulnerability profiles of households as major drivers of violence, as they intersect with discourses surrounding masculinities, femininities and sexualities. The core discussions and analysis in this final research report are anchored in the following four themes: vulnerabilities, mobilities, access to infrastructure services, and violence. This was a multi-method research project and each of the methods was chosen to address specific types of data relevant to the specific research questions.