Life along KCR: Between aspirations for mobility and threat of eviction
Hidden within the narrow lanes of Moosa Colony, in UC-35 of North Nazimabad, Karachi, one can find the material ruins of the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR), faintly discernible in the sand-covered tracks and a few isolated posts bearing numeric markings.
The KCR’s golden era of the 1960s can be traced in Moosa Colony’s residents’ accounts; an era when the KCR represented a vanguard of modernity and embodied high aspirations for Karachi's landscape of mobility.
While operational inefficiencies eventually led to the KCR’s demise in the 1990s, with passenger traffic coming to a halt in December 1999, a plan is currently underway to revive it.
Although the KCR’s rebirth was considered as early as 2008, the project is now being fast-tracked under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and is aligned with the present government’s aspirations of building a Naya Pakistan; a collective nostalgia for the nation, with the KCR providing a renewed hope for a different future.