Author: Steve Inskeep
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: December 6, 2011
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cities-beyond-the-law/884390/
Nothing clarifies your thoughts on the role
of government quite so much as visiting a place that isn't governed.
I once visited such a place under construction
in Karachi, Pakistan. A developer was building small concrete row houses on
land he didn't own. Electricity came from cables illegally hooked to the nearest
power lines. Drinking water came not from plumbing but from delivery trucks.
And the children told me they were not attending any school. The nearest thing
to the rule of law were the police officers, who collected bribes to pretend
that the neighborhood didn't exist.
Millions of people in the developing world
live in communities like this, without security, infrastructure or other tangible
evidence of the state. They are not strictly a result of population growth,
but rather of the failure to manage its consequences. The trouble is that
people are overwhelming the capacity and infrastructure of the state, even
in rising economic powers like India and China.
New York once had its own ungoverned zones.
But many decades of investment in infrastructure, education and policing slowly
eased the city's problems.
Karachi, Pakistan's largest metropolis, has
grown so quickly since the country gained independence in 1947- to more than
13 million people, from about 400,000-that it has become almost unrecognisable.
No single political ideology created Karachi's
ungoverned zones. Rather, they were spawned by decades of spastic government.
National leaders veered from socialism to crony capitalism, from democracy
to dictatorship. In 1958, Gen. Ayub Khan took control of Pakistan in a military
coup. Fearing riots, one of his first priorities was moving people out of
central Karachi's informal neighborhoods-where many lived in appalling conditions
in shacks or tents.
The dictator brought in Constantinos Doxiadis,
then one of the world's leading city planners. He designed sprawling new suburbs
with subsidized homes along broad streets, intending to resettle half a million
people. Pakistan's government soon turned its attention to other projects,
however, and the suburban construction drive fell apart.
Today, informal settlement has become an industry
spread over hundreds of square miles surrounding Karachi. Politically connected
developers seize sections of government land and subdivide them into lots
for new homes-as many as 100,000 per year.
Some are sprawling South Asian McMansions.
Most are tiny row houses, where poor residents are left to dig their own sewers
and steal electricity. The police have worked out a standard payoff to look
the other way. In 2010, the going bribe was 5,000 rupees per lot, about $57.
But there are consequences to moving the real
estate market beyond the law. Greed and emotions run high. Land battles contribute
to gunfights between Karachi's political parties- shootouts that kill far
more people than terrorism does.
Violence disrupts what few government services
are available in some areas. At an empty school I visited in October, the
writing on the chalkboard showed that no teacher had been there since May
31. The teachers came from outside the neighborhood, and local gunfights made
the commute too risky.
When governments turn instead to dreamy plans,
ideological warfare or corruption, they make themselves irrelevant. As Nazim
Haji, a Karachi businessman, put it, "We're not a poor country. We're
a poorly managed country."
Increasing wealth has allowed some people
to insulate themselves from collapsing urban infrastructure. In Karachi, affluent
families have hired private security guards, or bought generators to deal
with daily electric blackouts.
Last year I went looking for that Karachi
suburb from the late 1950s, when the suburbs were being built.
A friend helped me find one of the original
houses in Korangi, and the elderly woman who was its first resident. But the
old broad street had become barely wide enough for a single car. Longtime
residents told me they had built new and bigger houses over the years.
People made room for the larger houses by
moving the front walls forward to capture part of the street for themselves.
Garbage was often left on the street, which also flooded during monsoon season,
and the nearby drain was clogged. Residents said the floor of the old woman's
house from the 1950s had once been above ground, but was now about two feet
below. She'd piled up a little dam of rocks in front of the door in hopes
of keeping out the annual rains.
Afterward, I thought of ancient cities like
Babylon and Sirkap, a ruined city in northern Pakistan. There, a guide had
shown me a hole where archaeologists digging many feet below ground had found
the remnants of buildings long gone.
It had taken centuries for the city to rise,
decline and disappear. I wondered if it had suffered from a failure to mind
the public interest: cleaning the drains, picking up the garbage, respecting
the rule of law. And I wondered if Karachi was now experiencing a high-speed
version of the process that put that ancient city under ground.
Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR's "Morning
Edition" and the author of "Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi."
