Unsettling streetscapes: Everyday occupations of public spaces in karachi

Abstract

Within Karachi's fast-transforming urban landscape, ordinary residents retain and sustain ways of occupying public space that defy categorizations of modern urban planning disciplines. As newly built skyscrapers, gated and securitized upper-middle-class enclaves, flyovers, highways and 'signal-free' corridors massively transform its geography, Karachi's lower-income residents negotiate ways of inhabiting public space on their own terms. The streetscapes of the old city area of Karachi offer an urban microcosm in which the norms and forms of inhabiting the street are ruled by memories and histories of the migrations that transformed the city at partition in 1947. Residents of this area invoke their attachment to places and times left behind but that persist in the ways that they inhabit the streets and public spaces of the neighbourhood. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which these streetscapes unsettle and come up against the modern 'logos' of urban planning and modern city-globalizing schemes. In doing so, I bring attention to practices that exist on the margins of modern governmental disciplines and that disturb the conventional thresholds that are supposed to exist between public and private, work and leisure. I also draw a contrast between these practices and a recent development in Karachi's urban landscape-namely the encirclement of one of Karachi's most revered Sufi shrines by a commercial high-rise complex.What emerges from the comparison are the complex registers that inform the ways in which people engage with urban transformative processes, with one context providing a more involved engagement than the other.