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Tuesday March 19, 2024

‘Clean’ cities

By Editorial Board
November 13, 2018

The word ‘encroachment’, like all technocratic terms used to impose specific policies, is politically-loaded. It implies that those who are operating from a particular area are doing so illegally and thus can be evicted through any means necessary. The shopkeepers of the historic Empress Market in Saddar have been described as encroachers and this is has been used to destroy their livelihoods. On Sunday, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation demolished more than a thousand shops in the area. The rationale for this police action, which ruins the lives of people who were already struggling, is that the Saddar area needs to be restored to its original shape. Even if one agrees that heritage is important and that aesthetics need to be part of urban planning, this is not the way to go about it.

The fact is that the shopkeepers of Saddar had agreements with the KMC for the last 30 years and now the city suddenly decides to essentially tear those contracts up. Mayor Wasim Akhtar has claimed that the shopkeepers who had rent agreements will be given alternative spaces but surely that should have been arranged before the police action was taken. A suitable notice period could have been given to the shopkeepers so that they would have had time to settle into their new spaces. As it is, the city government is notorious for making promises to those negatively affected by development, but then never following through.

Anti-encroachment drives in Karachi, and indeed the rest of the country, have a tendency to target the poor. Powerful land-grabbers snatch prime property but action is never taken against them. If anything, the state works hand-in-glove with them to give away public land at throwaway prices. Those who are wealthy enough can pay to have their properties ‘regularised’. That option was not available to the shopkeepers of Saddar or before that to the residents of Lyari whose homes were demolished to make way for an expressway. Nostalgia for the Saddar of the colonial era should not trump the lives of real people.

What is most infuriating about this imposition of state will on helpless people is that alternatives exist if the government is willing to do the work. If the ultimate goal is conservation of historic areas, the government should update environmental protection laws to prevent further decay of old buildings. It may want to revisit the Karachi Development Authority plans of the 1970s and 1980s which facilitated the construction of high-rise buildings and was the true culprit of Saddar losing its historic nature. But turning shopkeepers into scapegoats for what is a failure of planning at the city-wide level is the easy way out for a state that wants to tell people it has results but which doesn’t want to make a genuine effort.