KARACHI: It used to be a major lifestyle shift to be living in an eight or 10-storey apartment building.

However, imagine the change one needs to adjust to now with all these new buildings not stopping at 10 or so floors even. Even looking up at them makes one dizzy. Wherever you go you find a tall building under construction with those yellow construction cranes for carrying building material higher and higher. And if there is one building coming up somewhere, look around and there will be another one close by. And it is very likely that they will be competing, going one up on the other.

Built in the 1960s, the round-shaped 22-floor and 331ft-tall Habib Bank Plaza building used to be the tallest in not just Karachi but Pakistan as well. The Central Ruet-i-Hilal committee too was known to climb up to the building’s rooftop for sighting the Ramazan or Eid moon. Well, at least they did that until after the turn of the millennium. That was when the 29-floor MCB Tower, with three basements, came up. To add the 381ft-tall building also boasted of a helipad at the top. Now these two bank buildings have another tall neighbour, the 23-floor and 361ft-tall UBL Tower, which can also be spotted from afar. But these three and other buildings adding floor after floor are just no match for the Bahria Icon Tower in Clifton, which is said to go up to 62 floors.

Skyscrapers, which are even taller, were first built in American cities, especially in New York. But the tallest building of the world in the 1930s, the 102-floor Empire State Building is no longer the tallest one there with so many other taller structures all around. Today it is the 28th tallest building with the 2,717ft-tall and over 160 stories high Burj Khalifa in Dubai taking over the title of the tallest building of the world after several other contenders of the same title before it such as Toronto’s CN Tower, Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, etc.

They may be magnificent structures and impressive landmarks but high-rises come with their own set of issues. When they can’t spread horizontally, there is the vertical sprawl because the main reason for the coming about of such buildings is high density of the population and scarcity of land. But unlike other countries in Asia where people prefer living in high-rise apartment buildings because they are cheaper, in Karachi these are the most expensive places to live. That is why, other than the office buildings, those offering housing are coming up in clusters in affluent areas.

Having a building with so many occupants also bounds the builder to provide them with all the utilities such as water, power and gas. They should also offer ample car parking. But although most buildings here do provide car parking, they are behind on utilities.

There is also an issue of surpassing by-laws in this kind of vertical growth. In most places the pipeline networks such as those for providing water and the sewerage lines are not broad enough for the burden being put on them. And that is why everyone is complaining of water scarcity and the roads are filled with sewage from the overflowing gutters.

Experts also say that Karachi is built on a fault line and God forbid if there was ever a major earthquake here the devastation is unimaginable. Some of the taller buildings, especially those in the Clifton area, have also been built on sandy ground, the experts warn.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2019