The relentless decline of once-beautiful Pakistani cities
https://arab.news/ctmru
At independence, Pakistan inherited many historical cities— Lahore, Multan, and Peshawar, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Shikarpur— and dozens of new ones built by the British with colonial architecture, wide open roads, beautiful big gardens, and well planned civil and military sections on the outskirts. The old cities were jewels in the vast agrarian country and a big attraction for visitors from within and tourists from foreign countries. They were a beautiful combination of Mughal era architecture dotted with forts, royal gardens, tombs, historical mosques, and ancient bazars.
Karachi emerged as the most modern, a metropolis with dazzling colonial buildings, commercial centers, big hotels, and well-designed residential areas that rivalled Bombay along the same coast toward the East. The sea and clean beaches added to the natural beauty of this city. Islamabad, the new capital, in the foot of the Margalla hills was a statement of optimism, success and new affluence of the 1960s, which made a unique contribution to the urban landscape of the country with new concepts in town planning, green areas, public parks and a vast Margalla national park covering its three sides.
But unfortunately, the decline of Pakistan is not just economic, political, and social, it is total, and it strikes one when entering any small, medium, or large city, including the once ‘Islamabad the beautiful.’ In every city, traffic is a mess, there are encroachments on the roads, occupation of public lands and shanty towns, often on public lands, along streams, railway lines and green areas.
This is not the story of one Pakistani city or town-- it is an urban disease that has spread everywhere in the country.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais
This is not the story of one Pakistani city or town-- it is an urban disease that has spread everywhere. The reasons for this urban decay are known to all in Pakistan from the masses to people of wealth, privilege and power. The latter are the ones responsible for Pakistan’s urban problems because of their insatiable greed for wealth accumulation, through syndicates of land developers, politicians and bureaucrats. Together, and for mutual benefit, they have converted agricultural lands around Pakistan’s cities into housing colonies. This has become the biggest business where most black money is parked. Since, it is among the members of the same class, no questions are asked about the sources of income, and land plots, like many bank accounts, are nameless. Really big money has changed hands in Pakistan over the past four decades by allowing the establishment of housing societies, and some even use the names of state institutions to win public trust. There is now hardly any state institution that doesn’t have a series of housing colonies to benefit employees, but it is no secret that most of the owners who build houses are second buyers. You can see a ring of such unplanned and sprawling colonies around every city that have not only dwarfed, but besieged the larger parts of the inside town creating so many chokepoints.
The old bazars and colonial malls were not built for the vehicular traffic that we have today, without any restrictions. Neither were European cities, but they planned about 200 years ago, and dug deep for underground metros, subways and widened roads for public transport. Whatever good or bad public transport we had within the cities and between them, was eliminated by the political governments in the 1980s. You can see the sorry state of Karachi circular railways, its facilities and its lands and how they became occupied-- not possible without the urban mafias with connections in high places. The richest and most powerful class has segregated itself from Pakistani society by building its own colonies, hospitals, educational institutions, shopping centers and private entertainment. And civil society is so poorly organized and helpless that raising issues about urban rot persistently over plastic pollution, the release of raw sewage into rivers, streams and the sea, and encroachment invoke hardly any response.
It is shocking that while the cities are growing in the peripheries in all directions, space within is shrinking because of population pressures and the location of commercial centers. If one is able to get into these areas by driving a car, finding parking is close to impossible, as most spaces are occupied by the shopkeepers and their workers converting bazars into parking lots. There are new bazars created in residential areas of almost every city through corrupt deals between city bureaucracy and developers by allowing conversion of homes into commercial plazas, without any reasonable provision for parking.
Sadly, Pakistan’s historic urban heritage has deteriorated beyond recognition, and there appears to be little hope that someone with vision, leadership and determination could restore its past glory, or make its once beautiful cities them liveable for all again.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017). Twitter: @RasulRais
