Informal high-rises
THE chief justice of Pakistan has ordered that the high-rises in Karachi’s Punjab Colony and Delhi Colony should be demolished as they are illegal and structurally unsound and as such, they pose a threat to the people who live in them. However, there are thousands of similar high-rises in Karachi’s katchi abadis and planned areas as well.
The reason for the proliferation of high-rises in Karachi’s low-income areas is simple — there is a demand for them. The only other affordable option that the poor have is to live on the city fringe which involves considerable cost and travel time in commuting to and from work. It also means that women in most cases cannot work and in the absence of educational institutions, children cannot go to school. So it becomes cheaper and more convenient to rent or purchase small apartments on instalments nearer to places of work, recreation, education, and health. Informal developers cater to this demand by extracting maximum value out of land and the Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) and cantonment board staff helps them informally through a well-established system of bribes and commissions, in violating by-laws and zoning regulations.
The process of converting plots into high-rises is simple. An informal developer offers a katchi abadi house owner Rs4 lakh to Rs6 lakh (something he has never seen together in his life) and a couple of flats on the top floor of the building he intends to put up. The rest of the flats he rents, sells on instalments, or on pugri. Thousands of poor families have acquired homes in this manner.
If this process can be semi-formalised, as I have suggested many times before, tens of thousands of homes can be provided for the poor at almost no cost to the government. This would involve permitting ground-plus-three floor structures to be built on katchi abadi plots according to three or four types of pre-designed, standardised plans along with structural drawings which the contractors would have to follow and which the SBCA and cantonment board would have to oversee. To purchase these apartments, people at present borrow money from wherever they can as a result of which most of them are in debt. To help them, the state can also provide a long-term loan through mortgage financing. In addition, ground-plus-three floor construction will also give us an acceptable urban density.
The poor will pay the price for the failure of the government.
Demolishing the existing structures without a rehabilitation plan for the affectees may be according to law but it does not serve the dictates of justice. The people who will be affected are poor and have borrowed heavily for purchasing these apartments. After demolition, they will have no option but to go back to another katchi abadi or to live under bridges or on the streets as has happened so often when settlements have been demolished. In addition, their children will no longer be able to go to school. They will pay the price for the failure of their governments to provide them with affordable homes, the corruption of the state machinery and laws that cannot provide them justice.
What is required for the existing high-rises is a survey identifying those who are fully paid owners of the apartments, those who have purchased them on instalments, those on pugri, and those who are paying rent. The high-rise buildings should be demolished, but before that, their residents should be relocated to apartments in ground-plus-three buildings built on plots of single-storey katchi abadi homes. Legal action should be taken against the contractors who have built the high-rises and they should be forced to pay for the relocation-related construction and the rent, pugri, and instalments should not be paid to them but should be paid into a special fund which should be used for the upgrading of the settlement, creation of public spaces, and should be managed by neighbourhood committees of the settlement. If the contractors cannot be identified, then construction costs can be extracted from commercial development on the site or in some other katchi abadi. In the case of Delhi and Punjab colonies, this is possible because they are located on prime land and in an important corridor of the city.
I feel that there is an existing system in place which is providing homes to people which the state and state-supported market has not been able to do. As a result, homelessness is rapidly increasing in Karachi and the number of people sleeping under bridges and pavements is multiplying rapidly. The system whereby people are acquiring homes in katchi abadis should be accepted and supported so that it can be corruption-free and can create a better physical and social environment at least for those existing settlements where it is possible and for future settlements as well.
The writer is an architect.
Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2020