‘Stop the sprawl, teach slum dwellers to build skywards in Karachi’
london — Architects and planners in rapidly growing cities must work with slum dwellers to build skywards and create high-rise, self-built housing blocks, a leading Pakistani architect says.
As millions more people pour into Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, local architects should work in city slums to allow residents to develop their homes into multi-storey buildings that can accommodate more urban migrants, said Arif Hasan.
The academic, architect and planner who has worked with slum communities in Karachi for over four decades, said rapid urbanisation means cities must try new approaches to private developments of apartment blocks.
“I don’t think you need to redevelop these settlements,” Hasan, 73, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“I think you need to upgrade them, and make it possible for the people, if they want to build upwards, that they build upwards,” he said, speaking at a conference organised in London on Tuesday by INTBAU, an international architecture and heritage organisation.
Of Karachi’s total population of around 15 million, activists estimate that about 60 per cent now live in self-built slum homes known locally as ‘katchi abadis’.
Across the city, these vary from improvised wooden shacks to sizeable brick homes which have been developed over decades to link into electrical and sewage systems.
Slums near the city centre have “densified” massively in recent years to house a growing urban population, said Hasan. Most houses are shared by more than 10 family members and men are often forced to sleep in nearby parks, he added.
The Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), a humanitarian architecture organisation Hasan chairs, has begun advising residents on the design and engineering skills to build high rise. OPP has worked with slum dwellers to develop lowlying homes in Orangi Town — the 8,000-acre (3,200 hectare) Karachi neighbourhood widely cited as Asia’s largest slum — since 1982. But architects now offer solutions to its challenges of building higher, such as structural, plumbing and ventilation issues. —Reuters