How Karachi developed by jugard
Arif Hasanâs lessons from 45 years of urban planning SAMAA | Mahim Maher - Posted: Dec 19, 2020 | Last Updated: 3 months ago SAMAA | Mahim Maher Posted: Dec 19, 2020 | Last Updated: 3 months ago
Street vendors and hawkers protest Dec 18, 2020 at Empress Market in Karachi after the SC ordered them evicted and the KMC razed their shops and pushed them out. PHOTO: ONLINE/Anwar Abbas
One day architect, provocateur, town planner Arif Hasan went to see Shafiqur Rahman Paracha, the bureaucrat who was in charge of resettling people uprooted by the building of the Lyari Expressway.
âDid you know that as a result of the destruction 3,286 students were not able to sit their Matric and Inter exams,â Arif Hasan asked Paracha.
Underpasses, flyovers and parking plazas are often presented as the epitome of development. But such expensive interventions usually fail to improve neighbourhoods because their very conceptualisation is flawed and does not take on board the real issues of people they are meant to be for. What can planning learn from the failures of the past?
Illustration by Samiah Bilal
Midas, the king of Phrygia, was renowned for his wealth. According to the Greeks, his fabulous riches were the result of the kindness he showed to Silenus, the old goat-like tutor of Dionysus, the god of wine, vegetation and ecstasy. So pleased was Dionysus with Midas’s behaviour that he granted the king one wish. Midas asked for everything he touched to be turned to gold. At first Midas was overjoyed with the gift, but once he realised that even his food and drink were transformed upon touching his lips, he was horrified. Out of pity, Dionysus told him how to wash away his golden touch, which he did in the river