Housing: verb, not noun

The writer is partner of Saleem, Alam & Co, and director of the Urban Unit.
“There is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt as, as injustice”. Thus Amartya Sen begins the opening lines of The Idea of Justice by quoting Dickens. What the CDA has done in the name of ‘slum clearance’ in I-11 Islamabad is not just an injustice, it is a travesty that no right thinking person can condone.
First, though, an important lesson on semantics: there are no ‘slums’ in Pakistan. There are katchi abadis, or informal settlements in urban areas, where the poor, not having any other option, maintain a fingernail’s grip on things as elemental as shelter, clean water, sanitation, healthcare facilities and schools. However, they have little problem with work.
The urban elite throws up plenty of employment opportunities but conveniently looks the other way when the people who build and clean their city, take away the trash, wash their clothes, cars and dogs, serve them their food and do what not head home for the night. The Rs15,000 monthly salary they pay is supposed to wash away a guilty conscience. It doesn’t.
The erudite Tasneem Siddiqui echoes Gore Vidal when he points out that housing is a verb and not a noun. So used is the urban elite to its privileges, Siddiqui actually has to remind us katchi abadis are a phenomenon, not an aberration. For those who still don’t understand, allow me a few examples:
Social media in Pakistan is full of people complaining about the energy crisis. What’s rich is that they’re the ones consuming what little electricity we produce.
Civil society often takes up arms against overpasses and underpasses as they are multi-billion rupee white elephants that devour what little green and civil remains in our cities. But they’re the same folks who eventually wind up being the car-owners using them.
Environment groups in English-medium schools exhort their fellow students to conserve water by turning off the tap. Never mind that the car that drives daddy’s precious was most likely washed in clean drinking water before they woke up for school.
Nowadays in Karachi, if anyone has the shame to maintain a garden with anything but their own recycled grey water, they’re using water – putrid as it may be – that is otherwise the share to be consumed. at greater cost and risk, by the urban poor elsewhere.
It is documented that about 33 percent of Lahore’s population lives in 90 percent of its footprint. The vast majority of its citizenry are crammed into a tiny 10 percent of the great city’s footprint. That’s just an example. I would wager land occupation and access to other urban utilities in our other cities would be similarly inequitably skewed; where the vast minority that is the urban elite consume more than its fair share of resources necessary to make a city livable, workable and sustainable for the vast majority of urban poor.
I’m not an economist, but I know this: when resources are in short supply, over-consumption or monopolisation by one set of interests will be to the detriment of others. And that, dear readers, is how the phenomenon of slums originates. – when the urban elite over-consume urban resources such as land, water, sanitation, public space: all the things that make a city livable, workable and sustainable for the majority. What you get instead is a city that works for the minority – the urban elite.
For the urban elite, cities work very well. Urban loadshedding schedules are laughably and ridiculously skewed against rural consumers. Scheduled outages are dealt with by generators run on diesel. Unmetered water connections and subsidised tariffs means they can use and waste as much water as they please and not pay more than a few thousand rupees for the pleasure. Metalled roads lead from suburbs to money-making schools, commercial districts where property sells in the millions of rupees and cinemas offer western entertainment. Private housing schemes provide their own security, shopping malls and exclusive clubs various types of recreation. It’s another world – all private, air-conditioned, expensive and unwelcoming to the urban poor.
The urban elite are so caught up in its bubble they can scarcely see what’s before their eyes. Take drinking water, for example. The urban elite have the pocket to afford clean drinking water made ubiquitous by little plastic bottles. The newspapers and media the urban elite are exposed to sell these products, often in colour and in half-page ads. Nowhere does this media report that nearly 50 percent of people in Pakistani hospitals today suffer from water-borne disease. It wouldn’t matter. The poor don’t have electricity for television or the internet anyway and can hardly afford a newspaper subscription, let alone a regular supply of bottled water. So perhaps we’re blind. Or perhaps we’re blinded. Either way, worryingly few see the inequity and injustice of the CDA demolition drive of I-11.
According to reports, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has admitted a public interest petition challenging CDA evictions in Islamabad and has stayed any further evictions. The court has ordered the agency, the chief commissioner and the police to report on the number of katchi abadis demolished to date. I, for one, want to know how a court of law could take a man’s submission to have the domicile on his CNIC changed and convert it into ordering orders of the demolitions.
Let’s see what the CDA has to say. The National Housing Policy of 2001 requires resettlement before eviction of informal settlement. But the CDA just suggested that the residents of the ‘slum’ were of a criminal element, always efficient in these sorts of things, destroyed the homes, lives and futures of countless people.
Let’s see what the court does. Pakistan is the most urbanised country in South Asia. It’s population is set to grow another 100 million and its cities are due to double in size and population in the next two decades. Unless we change our paradigm of urban development, informal settlements and inequitable cities will be some of the defining characteristic of our future.
Our legal system and recognition of fundamental rights cannot be confined to a Pakistan of the 1950s, 1960 or even 1990s, or rely on colonial laws and out-dated urban theories that scarcely register what modern society views as a decent position on the simple issue, in the 21st Century, to have a roof over your head.
New demographic changes – the ‘youth bulge’ – puts immense pressure on already strained urban utilities such as housing and urban land. In a few years, these young people will be out of school and looking for work and an affordable place to work, live and raise a family. Our cities and our city fathers must ensure that plenty of opportunities exist. Nothing less than the future of the national economy is at stake.
This CDA evictions case is an historic opportunity for our jurisprudence to evolve a concept of housing and the right to shelter of the poor. Of a right that can speak to the people of a city and not just its elite; of a legal and political system that recognises that a person’s rights to health, trade and many more are tied to their ability to access the resources of their city. And all citizens must, at some level, have equitable and sustainable access to these resources.
The CDA evictions case is a chance for our Supreme Court to advance our jurisprudence and recognise a Right to the City. To quote David Harvey, such a right “is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back control which they have for long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanisation. Lefebvre was right to insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all.”
Don’t be surprised if this appears an alien concept. Our Supreme Court has always been at the forefront of recognising new fundamental rights. In 1994, when it had the chance in the Shehla Zia case to recognise the right to a clean and healthy ‘environment’, the constitution didn’t even contain the word ‘environment’. The Supreme Court must overturn the impacts of the I-11 evictions and ensure they never happen again. Otherwise, the injustice will forever remain finely felt and perceived.
Twitter: @rafay_alam