‘Low-cost housing’s defective architecture to blame for 2015 heat wave deaths’

The massive toll claimed by the heatwave of July 2015 was an outcome of the defectively planned low-cost housing and houses in shanty towns, observed Prof Jamil Kazmi, of the University of Karachi’s Department of Geography while discussing his paper, “Appraising ecological issues in a megacity through geospatial technology: a case study of Karachi.’

He was speaking at the fourth plenary session of the international conference on “Managing Megacities 2016”, at the University of Karachi, on Wednesday afternoon.

Karachi, he said, was one of the largest cities of the world; around 2,511 square miles in area but most of its population were migrants. Its three main rivers were Lyari, Hub, and Malir and over 51 percent of its population were living in shanty homes or make-shift dwellings along the banks of these rivers.

“Houses in our tropical climate should have high ceilings and adequate cross-ventilation. These low-cost dwellings,” he said, “had very low ceilings with no proper ventilation.”

This, coupled with the fact that it was the hottest summer after 1938 with abnormally high levels of humidity, caused a lot of heat strokes, resulting in death.

Prof Kazmi stated that it was a clear indication of the fact that we did not have a viable housing policy for the less fortunate. This, he said, unfolded the elitist approach in our civic planning. “We must change our housing patterns,” he urged. Even though water was in a surplus quantity, there was massive mismanagement of water resources, he said.

Turtles were very important for our economy, he said, and added that a viable turtle preservation policy was a need of the hour. Reminding participants of the Tasman Spirit – carrier - incident of 2003 when there was an oil spill of 64,000 tons after the ship ran aground. As a result, thousands of turtles perished. The worst part of it, he said, was that nobody was fined for this disastrous slip.

He was deadly against the sand and gravel excavation that occurs unabated all over the town by builders observing that among other things this made conservation of the city’s millennia-old cultural heritage impossible.

As for the Dengue virus, he said that it was ‘imported’ from Bangladesh and made an inroad all the way to Swat. “Overhead tanks had outlets which allowed the entry of the virus into the water supply,” whereas Malaria incidence was very high in shanty towns.

There were, he said, over 17,000 tube wells in the city which had lowered the sub-soil water level with its attendant disastrous effects.

The habitat of animals which was essential to the maintenance of nature’s balance was being eroded by urban expansion, Prof Kazmi further observed.

Eduardo Marquez from Brazil talked at length about inequality and segregation in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

His talk was reflective
of nostalgia for genuine people-oriented socialism with overwhelming government intervention in the welfare sector.

He talked at length about the embedded “favelas” (slums), and the gated condominiums being a symptom of class segregation. “They were built on invaded land.”

Then, he said, there were corticos (tenements).

He said that peripheries became heterogeneous because of upward social mobility - during President Lula D’Silva’s reign from 2003 to 2011 - increasing presence and role of the state and increasing presence of higher state production.

He talked at length about transport and housing policies in present-day Sao Paulo through multimedia presentations; he showed the disparity between the rich and the poor, the class chasm and the gated condominiums of the city as well as the abodes of the super rich and the shanty towns.