The Adab Festival kick-started its Saturday session on Karachi’s urban planning, garbage management and public spaces with a short documentary playing a song of hope that all ethnicities living in Karachi would come together and join hands for the development of the city.
Yeh sheher baray dil waloun ka
Hum sab aa kar juur jayeen gay
This is a city of big-hearted people. We will all come together and unite.
It was followed by a chat between the panelists, Sindh Information Minister Saeed Ghani and urban planner Arif Hasan.
Hasan said Karachi’s institutions have been damaged “systematically”.
There is need for proper training of the officials in different institutions.
The Master Plan Department of Karachi is ineffective because of improper policies, he said, adding that the Karachi Building Control Authority has been converted to the Sindh Building Control Authority, which is an unjustified act for the city.
He questioned where investment was being made in Karachi.
Answering his own question, Hasan said contractors are minting money and no investments are being made.
Karachi has been divided and the citizens are not responsible for this, but the politicians, he said.
Coming to K-IV, he said it needed 10 more years for completion and that the city won’t change from mega projects.
He made it clear that no Master Plan authority in Karachi will work without proper planning.
“What type of master planning would be conducted in Karachi? The land spaces from both the sides from Karachi to Hyderabad have been sold and taken by builders, developers and the armed forces,” he said.
The lands on National Highway, he said, are encroached by a strong land mafia and the remaining portions have been in control of developers and the armed forces.
Hasan called for Karachi to be a commuter-pedestrian friendly city.
Inaccessible public spaces
Prominent architect Marvi Mazhar said there are timings for parks in Karachi from 6am till 9am and then from 4:30pm till 9pm. “In the rest of the world, parks are thoroughfares, spaces where you can cross by, but here we have fences and gates [installed at the boundary of the parks].”
She said that the design of public spaces is void of any study or research. Citing an example of the Jehangir Park, opposite to Empress Market in Saddar, she shared how an amphitheatre has been constructed, but there is no cultural programmer.
“Who does that amphitheatre serve when there are no plays or acts being conducted there?” she pointed out. There’s another added ghost library inside the park. “There are already several other ghost libraries in the city.”
She said that a structure has been designed in front of the Empress Market by the government, which has turned into a parking lot, but apparently, it was supposed become a smart city like ‘bazaar’ that exists in Singapore and Bangkok.
‘Karachi is fragmented, segregated’
Urban planner Farhan Anwar said that a city cannot be resilient unless all its citizens believed that the city is giving back to them.
He said that Karachi is fragmented and segregated.
Coming to the planning of the city, he shared that the master plan, in its traditional sense, is now a dinosaur of the past. “Nowhere in the world are master plans being made where macro-level planning is done. They’ve brought planning down to the neighbourhood level. When we talk about a modern-day sustainable city, the core of that city is a smart neighbourhood,” he stressed.
Saeed Ghani plays the blame game
PPP’s Ghani, as usual, placed blame on the public as well as the government for the mess Karachi was in.
The city, he said, was livable, until “some forces” captured its control by force in the mid-80s. However, now the city has gotten rid of that force.
As for those who have lost their homes in the anti-encroachment drives over the last few years, he said that it is not possible for the Sindh government to provide them alternatives in one year’s time as per the directives of the Sindh High Court.
from SAMAA https://ift.tt/2uYxhVG
No comments:
Post a Comment