Karachi: Site Town and the Orangi Nalla
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Karachi: Site Town and the Orangi Nalla
June 24, 2007
Mapping SITE
Part of the concluding activities of the Asia Urbs Capacity Building Project in urban design and sustainable city development, the monograph tackles the state of affairs within the discipline of urban design
The report highlights the contours of Karachi’s SITE Town, housing an industrial estate, labour and many squatter settlements
Karachi is one of the cities that seem to reflect all the contradictions of human life on earth at the dawn of the new millennium. Nobody knows exactly how many people live in Karachi. Estimates vary from 12 to even 15 million people. The city is the economical powerhouse of the nation, but combines the affluence this brings with obscene poverty and violent exclusion. Like many of the world’s mega cities, its development is largely determined by chains of value creation that fall outside the formal economy.
The city bares the traces of its dramatic history. Throughout its history, Karachi has been forced to absorb the calamitous events that shaped the nation of Pakistan. The city grew very rapidly over the last half century, following the partition from India in 1947, from a city of less than half a million people to its current size. Before partition 51 per cent of its population was Hindu, 42 per cent was Muslim. Four years later, 96 per cent of its population was Muslim and only two per cent Hindu. Likewise, before Partition Urdu was the language of a minority to become the native tongue of half of its population by 1951 (Hasan, 2002). More than half a century of rapid expansion and spectacular in migration has turned the city into a chequered quilt of ethnic groups.
The municipality of SITE Town, one of Karachi’s 18 towns and the object of this study, is no exception and contains many of the layers that are present in the city at large. The town includes small pockets that date back to the early 19th century and were part of Karachi’s historical periphery, but have long since been swallowed by the city’s vigorous growth. It is home to some more consolidated communities that settled in the area about half a century ago, but also includes areas that are barely two decades old.
SITE Town is situated on the northern bank of the Lyari River. The old city of Karachi, which was referred to as Kurachee, historically developed on the southern bank of the River (on a branch of Lyari River that has since been covered). The colonial cantonment was located a bit more inland. The district of Saddar Bazaar lay in between the indigenous city and the colonial cantonment and functioned as an interface between the two. North of the River there was hardly any settlement, apart from a few century old villages. The area mainly provided pasture land for the Baloch communities living in these villages. SITE Town is still home to Karachi’s main historical cemetery, and includes the Gutter Bageecha, a sizeable pocket of agricultural land, which historically included nurseries where vegetables and flowers were cultivated.
Shortly after partition a very large trading estate was established on the portion of flat land which stretches out from the Lyari River northwards to the foot the Orangi Hills. The Sindh Industrial and Trade Estate or SITE from which the town’s name has been derived, was first established as part of the young nation state’s ambitions to create a solid economic base and employment opportunities for its people. From its inception the trading estate was defined a separate institutional entity. Until today it falls under the direct jurisdiction of the province of Sindh. The estate is situated on the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR), the northern branch of which runs down the estate’s entire length, parallel to Estate Avenue which is the central artery of the 7km long industrial zone. This northern branch of the KCR is no longer operational. However, the right-of-way is still available and has been the subject of various public transit proposals.
The municipality of SITE Town is a very recent construct, having been jumbled together in an ad hoc fashion under the 2000 Devolution Plan and governed under the Local Government Ordinance promulgated in 2001. According to the 1998 census the population of the area was estimated at 470,000. More recent estimates place the population figure closer to the 700,000 mark. The 10 union councils that together form SITE Town house a variety of communities that otherwise, have vary little in common. There are several ethnic groups including Urdu-speaking Punjabis, Sindhis, Kashmiris, Seraikis, Pakhtoons, Balochis, Memons, Bohras and Ismailis with Pathans or Pakhtoons forming the bulk of the population.
SITE Town’s ethnic fragmentation and polarisation is not specific to the area, but is merely symptomatic of one of the most widespread characteristics of Karachi, whereby various ethnic communities tend to cluster together in their own separate colonies and to maintain their separate identities and ways of living. Each ethnic group that settled in the area has progressively marked out its own distinctive, quite easily identifiable territory. These pockets or enclaves co-exist side by side in varying conditions of peace and harmony.
Baloch villages like Hasan Auliya are some of the oldest inhabited settlements on this side of the Lyari River dating back to the early years of Karachi’s history. These were followed in the post-partition years by waves of Urdu-speaking migrants from India who settled in the areas of Pak Colony and Old Golimar. These areas now constitute some of the most well-consolidated parts of the Town and are home to a more skilled and literate population of middle and lower middle income people.
The establishment of the industrial area in the late 1940s was followed by the development of workers’ colonies to house the influx of migrant workers attracted to the area. Since the provision of workers’ housing has proven to be dismally inadequate (the current SITE Town administration no longer consider the provision of housing for its workers to be a financially viable option), several katchi abadis or informal settlements have sprung up in the area.
The industrial area is currently under great pressure from foreign investors to re-fashion and clean up its image by ensuring greater conformity with WTO environmental standards
Metroville, one of the housing schemes launched by the state in the mid ’70s in Karachi, in a rather unsuccessful attempt to meet housing demand in Karachi, is a major exception to the dominant patter of katchi abadis. The Metrovilles have only been inhabited fairly recently, after years of lying vacant, and then too, not by the original target-group of low-income communities. Instead the serviced plots provided under the Metroville scheme proved to be unaffordable for the poor and have instead been bought up by middle-income families.
The biggest ethnic grouping in SITE Town remains that of the Pakhtoons or Pathans, who form the biggest chunk of its population and are the most recent arrivals in the area. Informal settlements like Pathan Colony, Frontier Colony and Islamia Colony are all Pathan strongholds. The Pathan dominated areas include many single men who have descended to Karachi to work but whose families continue to live in the North Western Frontier Province.
Besides the fudging of administrative jurisdictions and unclear demarcations of authority brought about by the administrative refashioning of Karachi in 2000, SITE Town suffers from the fact that it has no collective identity as a unified town, never having existed as one throughout Karachi’s history. There is no real sense of belonging or association with the Town amongst its population which in any case, is composed primarily of migrants hailing from very different ethnic backgrounds. The situation is further compounded by the adversarial relationship between the Town administration and its single biggest administrative entity, namely the Sindh Industrial and Trading Estate. Within the recent construct of the Town, SITE has maintained its autonomous status. Thereby it can choose to completely disregard and bypass the existence of the Town. There is no culture or tradition of cooperation and collaboration between both parties. They view each other with great mistrust, with SITE claiming that the Town has in no way helped it to acquire services, utilities and infrastructure, and the Town accusing SITE of a general lack of interest in what happens outside of its own borders.
The industrial area is currently under great pressure from foreign investors to re-fashion and clean up its image by ensuring greater conformity with WTO environmental standards. Therefore, these days SITE Limited (the governing and administrative body of the industrial area) and the city administration are keenly negotiating with foreign companies to help the city acquire a treatment plant to process industrial waste. Cleaning up the area’s image is an enormous challenge, given the area’s history of sectarian and ethnic-based violence in the 1980s. SITE Town with all its power struggles and conflicting claims and jurisdictions makes for a very potent mix.
SITE Limited and SITE Town, in other words, not only represent two very different realities, they also present contrasting dynamics. SITE Limited, the corporation managing the Trading Estate, looks at the future with great confidence and tries to control its own future as much as it can. The trading estate is actively pursuing its gradual upgrading to meet international standards. It is investing in its own water supply and industrial effluent treatment. Land prices in the area are rising and the older industrial facilities are replaced by more contemporary ones, often in multiple story buildings. SITE Town in contrast is an impoverished town with limited responsibilities and limited means. It is hardly in a position to shape its future development. It has some responsibility in the allocation of means that are distributed through the town level, but is in no position to meet the major challenges and the backlog in infrastructural investment. Although some planning responsibilities have been devolved from the city level to the municipal level, no planners have been appointed so far.
Space wise these two contrasting dynamics are played out in two contrasting arenas. The active renewal and upgrading policy of SITE Limited visibly unfolds along the Estate Avenue, the central backbone of the Trading Estate. In contrast the piecemeal and haphazard development of SITE Town is played out along the historical corridor of Mango Pir Road which passes through almost all of SITE Town’s Union Councils and also makes an important passage through the Trading Estate. Mango Pir Road is a necklace collecting the different faces of SITE Town. It is a key structure that holds the potential of becoming the arena in which SITE Town and its different communities can begin to actively shape their own future.
The Asia Urbs Project focused on one aspect of the Mango Pir corridor in particular: the Orangi Nalla which runs in parallel to the road and has to a large extent determined the general morphology of the corridor. Through consultation with various organisations active in the area the importance of the Nalla and its pending transformation for the future of the entire corridor in general and of SITE Town in particular became gradually apparent. The Nalla, as will be explained further, has over the years evolved from the backbone of early settlement in the area, to an urban backwater, open sewage drain and garbage dump. The communities living in the low-lying areas of the Nalla are exposed to industrial and household waste, as well as the crisis of seasonal flooding. What could have been an asset is increasingly perceived as a burden for the city’s development. The solution to this problem of water and solid waste management is subject to heated debate. This publication is first of all an attempt to document the questions that emerge from this debate, to subject those to rigorous analytical scrutiny, and to begin to formulate a possible way forward that tries to place the various propositions that have been made so far. Each of the positions taken so far by the various participants in this debate makes sense on its own terms, but often reflects a partial reality. The study does not seek to supplant the ensuing debate by the ultimate solution. Through this proposition we hope to have delineated the confines within which a constructive, sustainable and socially responsive solution to the problem can unfold. Ours is a clear proposition that, if debated, can give focus to the ongoing discussion.
Excerpted with permission from Karachi Site Town and the Orangi Nalla Edited by Michiel Dehaene and Anojie Amerasinghe Asia Urbs/European Aid, Co-operation Office Available with Department of Architecture and Planning, NED University of Engineering and Technonlogy, City Campus, Maulana Din Mohammad Wafai Road, Karchi-74200 Tel: 021-3058, 2620793 coccd@neduet.edu.pk ISBN 978-90-5682-831-8 183pp. Price not listed
Dr Michiel Dehaene teaches architecture at the University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Anojie Amerasinghe teaches architecture at the Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium
