How the (more than) other half lives

Two weeks ago, on the 20th of March, a fire broke out in Shanti Nagar, a slum in Gulshan-e-Iqbal in Karachi. Locals informed the fire department of the incident almost immediately, but by the time the fire trucks arrived – and whether their delay was caused by their inefficiency or because they had to negotiate the crowd that had gathered on the scene – there was nothing left but the ashes of over 300 shanties.

Shanties to you and me, but shelter to nearly 3,000 people, all of whom were left without homes. Some managed to save their belongings before the fire came. Some did not. Since the event happened in the afternoon, most adults were away, working, and their children left at home. Some unattended. Seven-year-old Danish's life was taken when the flames engulfed his home. Ten to fifteen other children were unaccounted for. Several others were injured.

It is impossible to quantify or relate to something as traumatic as the fire, the loss of life and the traumatic displacement of an entire community at Shanti Nagar. Arif Hasan, the eminent urbanist, once told an assembled audience in Lahore that there was nothing like a forced eviction; that they had to see one to really know what it meant. Of course, Hasan was not talking of people displaced because of things like fires or natural disasters. He was talking of people forcibly removed from their homes for the sake of "development", like when the officials of the Office of Education of the City District Government Lahore, on March 19, demolished some eight homes near the Lady Maclagan School on Bank Road to make space for the proposed new block of classrooms. That's not to say that the communities displaced in Shanti Nagar are any more or less traumatised than the families that were deemed to be illegal squatters on the property of the Lady Maclagan School. It is to say that the displacement by any means is traumatic.

The problem with slums, and there are many problems with slums, is that, as a rule, their inhabitants do not possess proprietary rights. Because they are not the owners of their shanties, their occupation sits at odds with the machinery of the state and the understanding of its laws. If someone doesn't have rights in property, how can he be said to have lost it? The machinery of the state does not look at the occupants of slums with a sympathetic eye. The same is true for the occupants of the homes demolished inside the Lady Maclagan School in Lahore. The land belongs to the City District Government of Lahore and, therefore, if the EDO (Education) deems it necessary to build a new block of classrooms, that is that. Occupation or not, homes or not, the cries of families being thrown to the wolves or not, the structures were "illegally occupied" and so the demolition team did not even have to inform the occupants of their decision.

The fact is that displacements, and the trauma that accompanies them, are everyday occurrence in Pakistan. If not at the hands of the elements and natural disaster (the flooding of the Leh Nullah in Rawalpindi routinely displaces hundreds), then at the hands of the numerous "encroachment drives" under the guise of "development".

The issue that appears is not of rights, but equity and morality. Cities in this part of the world, until recently, have been the exception and not the norm. Through history, with few exceptions, South Asians have been an agricultural and rural people. Now, we are told that over thirty five per cent of the people of Pakistan live in cities, and that in the near future, this figure will shoot past fifty per cent. At the same time, we have to understand how, as exceptions to the rule, our cities have grown. As the preferred space of the political, business and social elites, our cities have been occupied by a small but disproportionally influential set of elites. They have grown on the whim of whomsoever has had the occupancy of the civil secretariat or the position of general officer commanding the station. They have grown along the lines of a vision firmly set in the status quo.

But that is set to change. It must. The fact that slums exist is a proof of the fact that our cities are misallocating their resources in favour of a privileged few. For example, if one were to examine the footprint of the city of Lahore, they would find that a (incidentally elite) minority of the people live in the majority of the space occupied by housing schemes, cantonment boards and Defence Housing Authorities. Given the expected urbanisation of Pakistan, which is already the most urbanised country in South Asia, the pressures its new inhabitants will have on existing housing availability, sanitation, healthcare and educational services, employment opportunities and recreational spaces will be immense. Already, substantial proportions of the current and expected urban population live in slums or in unhygienic conditions. In Punjab, almost fifty per cent of the urban population lives in slums. In Karachi, I've been told that nearly seventy per cent of the population lives in slums.

The displacement of people for whatever reason is not without its cost. David Harvey, the noted academic and geographer in his recent seminal article 'The Right to the City' traces the history of urban displacement and links it firmly with urban violence. For example, Hausmann's Paris may have been the "city of lights" and the envy of every city back in the 1850s but the trauma of the displacements it caused, not to mention the economic disaster that was France's loss of the Franco-Prussian War, saw the birth of the Paris Commune. Similarly, readers are reminded of the fact that New York City in the 1970s was one of the most dangerous cities in the world and, in 1975, actually suffered bankruptcy. Harvey can trace these events to the trauma caused by massive displacements in the name of urban development undertaken in the preceding decades.

The overarching issue to be tackled is one of urban poverty and the effect it will have on the future of our cities. In Pakistan, with all the displacements effected and taking place, with the inequality in our cities increasing, we are lucky to have been spared the specter of urban violence (Karachi has nothing on, say, Rio de Janeiro, where some of the city's elite prefers to helicopter to work than take their chances on the favela mobs waiting for the opportunity to kidnap a millionaire). At some point, the Right to the City will have to be acknowledged and made part of a larger political debate.

In 1890, Jacob Riis published his work of photojournalism, "How the Other Half Lives", and documented the squalid conditions in which the inhabitants of New York City's tenements were forced to live. Condemned as muckraking journalism, it exposed the living conditions of the urban poor to the middle and upper classes of the city. But it was also powerful enough to attract the attention of, amongst others, Theodore Roosevelt, who used it as a basis to launch reform in housing in the city. When will our "How the Other Half Lives" be published?