INITIALLY, what makes Exhausted Geographies stand out from other works on Karachi is the delightful little box pack that it comes in, complete with a string tie. The box contains seven booklets, each with a large flip-out map or graphic image inside. The works in this volume range from academic research to abstract, artistic expressions, and give a breadth of empirical as well as qualitative knowledge on Karachi with an underlying theme: the claims and contestations over a city that is already segregated not only physically, ethnically, and socially, but also intellectually and ideologically.

Some authors, such as Nausheen Anwar, look for answers in scientific data, while others take up a personal, subjective recounting of childhood experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, such as the photo album by Fazal Rizvi. Some accounts are sentimentally-charged, encouraging the reader to side with the subjective vantage point of the writer, like in Zahra Malkani’s case of the Baloch missing persons. Others are value-neutral, presenting interesting, thought-provoking facts about the city and its social structure, like Shayan Rajani’s geo-ethnic map of notable families across pre-colonial Sindh. Anwar, a prominent sociologist, talks of the personal aspects of cognitive alignment in urban scenarios, and the perceptual mind-mapping by citizens to “counter the looming fear of disorientation”. Anwar holds formal maps, such as those that represent demographic data, as being more than mere communicative tools, especially in a value-laden urban arena. Produced by an overarching author-ity, such maps are indeed tools of wielding and asserting power by depicting the selective right over the process of representation, inference, and extrapolation of sensitive data, hence vesting in the administrative decision maker the potential to affect the dynamics of academic discourse as well as policymaking within urban scenarios.

In this way, maps represent technical expertise translated into concise visuals, and also demonstrate political authority, including the power to demarcate land control and division, land rights, and the limitation of ethnic or social classes that can lay claim to urban land. Alternative voices, ranging from technical disagreements to socially-motivated dissent, can help redirect the discourse of thematic or practical cartographic endeavours. NGOs, for example, can contribute greatly to mapping exercises by producing alternative readings of the space and its people, relying more on apparently whimsical accounts by laymen in the community rather than technically restricted parameters set out by academic precedence. Anwar maintains that maps are agenda-driven: they are not as neutral, innocent, or objective as they claim to be.

Maps, much like the experiential ambience of a physical space itself, are socially constructed realities. They are, after all, only a representation of a space, limited to particular parameters that pre-sent only a partial picture of the place: a filtered version of the ground reality, free from the ambient white noise of genuine stakeholder concerns and truths. Anwar concludes that “map-making is a political process rather than a technical one”: maps are political documents containing information that is at once technical yet only subjectively valid towards meeting a particular goal, such as providing a justification or cue for state action.

As an example, she cites maps that mark certain areas of Karachi as no-go zones due to security concerns. This style of representation, she argues, is highly inappropriate: no-go zones for whom? After all, there are people who, for one reason or another, call that area home. Why would anyone want to avoid such areas? Although her work is quite technical, its socially aware approach awakens the reader to the human aspect of creating maps, and of deciphering the subjective, value-laden vocabulary and imagery employed in the existing techniques of urban mapping.

Yaminay N. Chaudhri’s account is highly personal. She deviates from the academically-oriented discourse surrounding the city and its cognitive aspects, and reads urban spaces as fragmented projections of one’s memory. She talks of the psycho-social relationship between a person and physical place, both on the individual and collective level, through the personal association one forms with certain physical locations, which is based less on the inherent, tangible attributes of the place itself and more on the individually lived experience that one constructs around it. She indulges the reader in the peculiar longing for places, through elements of nostalgia and the physical manifestation of this desire — untranslatable, yet expressed in elements of architecture and in spatial configurations.

Her narrative of her early childhood years at Darakhshan reads like the beginning of a captivating novel on Karachi, alive with characters going about their most mundane morning chores. In just a couple of paragraphs she creates a surreal visual landscape of the neighbourhood, its residents and their activities imbuing the physical architecture with socially construed meaning. As the reader sinks into the narrative, it is suddenly cut short by the architecture that never materialised: half of the Darakhshan site that was never constructed; inanimate stories that never sprang into existence; the frozen characters that never got to inhabit those spaces, and remained imaginary mannequins.

Chaudhri describes with longing the potential balconies, gardens, windowsills, and sidewalks that were planned as part of the settlement but remained unrealised: their potential for nurturing life lying dormant in dusty archival records that did not become part of the construction deal. Over time, the remaining Darakhshan houses have also transformed, installing modern architectural elements, replacing the powdery paint and peeling plaster that “marked our palms and knees as we navigated the short walls, spiral staircases and rooftops as a pack of unruly kids”.

Like Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, Chaudhri’s account reads like a dreamy, nostalgic recreation, but of something that never was; much like a dream you try desperately to hold on to after sud-denly being jerked into waking reality. The graphics with her text strongly convey the idea of visual disjunction through their portrayal of spatially disjointed architectural elements and facades: juxta-posed, randomly cut up, repeated in a perhaps intentionally incoherent collage, this visual representation is a logical mental map of her narrative. Like the stubborn fragments of disconnected memories left behind that refuse to wither away with time, the graphics complement her “daily disoriented drives” through the neighbourhood.

Malkani discusses a more sombre issue, that of the disappearance of Baloch people and the apparent motives behind this. Although she does not state provocative facts or throw around controversial presumptions, she attempts to present a time-space overlay of the various individual disappearances of Baloch people from around Karachi. The disappearance of the Baloch from Karachi is also highly ironic, in her view, as Karachi is arguably (with a substantial backing of historical and ethnographic data) originally a Makrani-Baloch fishing settlement. She sees the struggle against disappearing individuals as a struggle to assert a reality that is deliberately being made invisible. The effort to bring this phenomenon to public attention through demonstrations in the visual, public, urban spaces might leave imprints on the city’s collective memory, and hopefully, its collective conscience.

Malkani gives interesting analogies: how a photograph, passport-sized or poster-height, coloured or achromatic, is proof that these people existed and left behind a mark, just like the strategically prepared map of a time stamp in a city’s history. She also cites the new, relatively faster medium of asserting this impactful alternative presence and the propagation of a suppressed movement: the online world. This is the new geography, transferring the protest from a selectively visible and screened public, urban space to a less discriminatory online arena, one with unrestricted access. But these online spaces, too, like the spaces of the city, are not entirely devoid of the regulating presence of authority, of the agenda-driven cartographers that Anwar dwelt upon, who aim to repress and standardise dissent. The visual material accompanying her account is a simple outline map of Karachi showing points and dates of disappearing people as a simple list of names. The city space is empty, without any marked roads or other features. Shayan Rajani re-stresses the notion of maps being far from value-neutral representational exercises.

Maps are underscored by and overlaid with nuances of the story that the mapmaker intends to communicate — and hence mapping is in effect a retrospective exercise, one with already determined outcomes. In an attempt to challenge our dependence on the colourful, political-boundary maps of today, Rajani presents a very non-conventional, non-Western, contextually-grounded way of understanding spatial and temporal distances by looking at a geographically situated genealogical tree of distinct dynasties across pre-British Sindh and their movement through the land. His research is not merely an exercise in documenting a physical location and its socio-ethnic composition; it is a way of conceiving space as being inseparable from its native inhabitants.

Preachers and saints left their imprints on the places they visited. These imprints were usually physical: specific routes across landmarks, their graves, their places of public preaching. But their im-prints also had a less tangible spiritual dimension: the villages they visited would contain stories of healing, or elders would recount the blessings they bestowed upon a certain family, or their help in resolving a dispute, that carried on the legacy of a saint as tied to a land and its people even when he was merely a transient figure in the spatial history of the place.

Through these enchantingly detailed anecdotes, Shayan Rajani hints at how arbitrary the established notion of making and reading maps is today: maps across contested nation-state boundaries, lines drawn on paper across terrain features, which are considered today as impenetrable, infallibly sacred limitations. His argument gives new meaning to ongoing debates on ethnic and national-ist-oriented separatism and secession movements, common not only in Pakistan but also in developed economies and societies, such as the Flemish and Catalan territories.

Shahana Rajani and Anam Soomro discuss what they term as the cartography of exclusion during the first two decades of Pakistan’s independence through an extremely detailed map that documents the forceful relocation of some of Pakistan’s (and Karachi’s) earliest migrant settlements. They challenge the subjective, aesthetic and pragmatic standards of the nation’s newly-appointed decision makers, who strove for the ideal city image and efficient spatial configurations through the exclusion of visually or socially unpleasant or unacceptable elements — including migrants. The authors challenge the arbitrary parameters for aesthetic sensibility and urbanistic propriety, and the urban administration’s authoritative position to decide who deserves to live in an urban scenario.

This, again, is an attitude not unique to Karachi, but seen in urban locations with high degrees of social or economic segregation: one man’s utopian dream is realised often at the expense of exterminating another’s everyday reality. In a similar spirit, Sarwat Viqar also explores the contestation between Karachi’s traditional quarters, including its fishing villages, and the self-proclaimed cultural superiority of English settlers and their urban lifestyle.

City planners and policymakers are often disengaged and distanced, both in theory and practice, from the living conditions of the settlements their decisions impact most. Their top-down views of power delegation, intellectual hierarchies, technical knowledge (and its exclusivity), and the categorical organisation of social space can sometimes conflict with inhabitants’ versions of socio-spatial configurations, which spring from unmediated, routine interactions and the naturally flowing mundanities of a particular communal network. Practically speaking, ideological issues — subjectivity, value-laden imagery, and contestation of popular discourse — are apparently only intellectual luxuries in a context like Karachi, and debating them would seem reasonable only when basic structural impracticalities of such a city have been ameliorated.

On the other hand, maybe it indeed is in this intangible theoretical contestation that we might find a process of bottom-up reform that leads to more effective decision-making, and hence mapping, for cities of the south. In this regard, this compilation is a commendable attempt at presenting these possibilities, and attempts to address a range of audience from the policymaking circles to individual artistic or ethnic collaboratives. The book is an excellent resource for enthusiasts of Karachi, from the devoted researcher to the casual seeker of instant visual gratification on his city.

The reviewer is an architect and is pursuing a Masters degree in City Planning at METU, Turkey.

Exhausted Geographies

(ART)

By Nausheen H. Anwar, Yaminay N. Chaudhri, Zahra Malkani, OPP-RTI, Shayan Rajani, Shahana Rajani, Fazal Rizvi, Anam Soomro and Sarwat Viqar

Edited by Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani

ISBN 978-9697605002

Self-published, available at T2F

Contact info: exhaustedgeographies@gmail.com