KARACHI, April 30: Blaming politicians for the unbridled growth of cities like Karachi and Mumbai, a German and a local expert stressed on Wednesday the importance of planning in urban development.

Speaking on ‘Urban development in the 21st century’ at the Goethe-Institut, Arif Hasan, chairman of the Urban Resource Centre in Karachi and founding member of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, concentrated on the neo-liberal, urban development paradigm in Asian cities and drew on his experiences while working with the URC and ACHR.

While comparing cities such as Beijing, Mumbai, Manila, etc, he said different cities with varied needs and population sizes had some strong similarities. Whereas politicians in Mumbai aim at making that city resemble Shanghai, our politicians in Karachi are striving to make the city look more like Dubai.

High-rises are coming up in most Asian cities being studied by the ACHR where ground plus eight floor buildings are being preferred. But preferred by whom, is one of the biggest questions here if you look at the needs of the people they are being built for. Can the motor mechanic who used to repair vehicles on the pavement outside his little hut still do the same kind of work if he is moved to the eighth floor?

That in fact is how Pakistan has changed the definition of ‘urban’. Development here, according to the URC chairman, whose organisation fights against eviction and gentrification or degradation of Karachi’s inner city, requires more land. To acquire more land in this densely-populated port city, the developers need to evict more and more people as it has been done for the construction of the Lyari Expressway or the several beach-facing projects that resulted in the demolition of some 138 villages. Some 50,000 families in Karachi have been relocated and put on the backburner since 1997, which will have some serious repercussions such as major changes in land prices, homelessness, joblessness, increase in katchi abadis, decrease in literacy rate, mass transit system problems leading to increasing loans.

The construction of apartment blocks, high-rises, flyovers, elevated expressways while displacing the poor from those areas without any proper planning is no solution. Between 1981 and 1998, 30,000 units were built for the lower-income population when there was a demand for 50,000, which means a backlog of 340,000 in 1998 and 520,000 today.

In Karachi, where 70 per cent of households have a monthly income of less than Rs10,000, who are we building these major projects for? There are three key players in the development of any city — politicians, planners and the people. In Karachi, as it has been seen, when the politicians and planners come close, the people and their needs grow apart.

Concluding his lecture showing pictures of displaced poor people sleeping in public toilets in the ideal city of our planners – Dubai – Arif Hasan said, “In major Asian cities, we have moved from importance of planning to the age of projects.”

Prof Dr Johann Jessen, a professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Stuttgart, in his lecture focused on the current problems and strategies regarding urban and regional development in Germany.

Giving the example of redevelopment in the port city of Hamburg and urban intervention in the Hamburg Hafen City Project and the Tubingen French Quarter, he explained how the problem in that part of the world was the decline in population due to a lower birth-rate that has also resulted in the increase of the population of older people there. This in turn raises the demand for immigration to fill jobs in the high-tech industry, agriculture sector, research and development.

City development in Germany is undertaken giving priority to planning while keeping in mind the economic competitiveness of the city regions and protecting natural resources to support social and cultural cohesion.

The impact of reunification in Germany has seen the growing as well as shrinking of various cities. Whereas there has been an economic decline in Eastern German cities, there is a rise on the other side allowing development to take place in the less populated areas where dense residential areas have been bulldozed to make way for modern townhouses, community centres, etc. The change is also brought about with the aim of establishing a new economic base.

The two lectures by the Pakistani expert and the German professor were in sharp contrast of each other. Whereas in Pakistan, redevelopment for the sake of keeping up with a globalised economy causes the marginalising of the poor sections here, in Europe they concentrate more on social and environmental issues before planning major city changes.