Urban transformations: brokers, collaborative ...

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Urban transformations: brokers, collaborative governance and community building in Karachi’s periphery a

Nausheen H. Anwar a

Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore Published online: 10 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Nausheen H. Anwar , South Asian History and Culture (2013): Urban transformations: brokers, collaborative governance and community building in Karachi’s periphery, South Asian History and Culture, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2013.863011 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2013.863011

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South Asian History and Culture, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2013.863011

Urban transformations: brokers, collaborative governance and community building in Karachi’s periphery Nausheen H. Anwar*

Downloaded by [Dr Nausheen Anwar] at 17:34 13 December 2013

Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore This essay reflects on the complexity of urban life in Karachi by exploring the politics of planning and community building in its urbanizing periphery. The periphery is an agrarian-pastoral stretch and sparsely populated region where villages (goths) were given usufruct rights during British rule. During General Pervez Musharraf’s (1999– 2007) post-9/11, post-liberalization and decentralization phase, this vast expanse was subdivided and administratively merged with the City District Government Karachi (CDGK). The attempt to reshape the periphery by bringing it under the control of decentralized governance has unfolded in conjunction with the rapid growth of unplanned settlements. This essay delves into the roles of key state and non-state players around whom the market for land in the periphery is evolving: the NGO Orangi Pilot Project-RTI, land brokers or dalaals, and Board of Revenue officials or land masters. These players compete, negotiate and collaborate in diverse ways to control land and use their economic and social capital to engage the different layers of the state. The contestations and fluid negotiations between key social agents who facilitate land conversions and tenure rights provide a lens through which we can critically examine the urban politics that undergirds land and homeownership for poor groups. Keywords: land; NGOs; urban politics; brokers; periphery

Introduction Karachi is a city of many layers, meanings and myths. With an estimated population of 21 million, it is Asia’s fastest growing city and Pakistan’s largest metropolis, as well a city of finance, commerce and spectacular consumption. It is also a city where risk, uncertainty, corruption and violence coalesce with profound possibilities for building new futures. For the urban poor, these futures pivot upon housing and infrastructure dynamics and sociopolitical practices through which the city is constituted. Amidst endless cycles of evictions, displacements, movement, illicit land transactions, settlement and community activism, these futures unfold messily on the city’s periphery. The periphery is where Karachi’s agrarian transformations and ‘unplanned’ urbanization intersect with patronage politics and Pakistan’s post-liberalization drive for decentralization. It is also where the poor struggle to make dreams into reality and where contingent developments transform public land into private property of homeownership. The periphery is an agrarian-pastoral stretch and sparsely populated region where villages (goths) were given usufruct rights during British rule. Baloch from the Brohi caste and agricultural labourers settled here and became the dominant ‘land-owning’ group. During General Pervez Musharraf’s (1999–2007) post-9/11, post-liberalization and decentralization phase, this vast expanse called Gadap Town and Keamari Town *Email: [email protected] © 2013 Taylor & Francis


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was subdivided and administratively merged with the City District Government Karachi (CDGK), dominated at the time by the ruling regional party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). But the attempt to reshape the periphery by bringing it under the control of decentralized governance has unfolded in conjunction with the rapid growth of unplanned settlements. Baloch goth elders have been selling lands to brokers and developers and in this process of village demolitions, displacements, land transactions and migrations, new ethnically heterogeneous settlements are emerging. According to the NGO Orangi Pilot Project, which plays an active role in mapping new settlements, there are 2000 villages located in Karachi’s periphery and over 600 have become abadis or urban settlements. In this evolving landscape, state permissiveness towards illegal occupancy and illicit land transactions is pervasive, and community building unfolds in a context undergirded by a self-organizing urbanity in which the land broker or dalaal is a vital Figure.1 These are sites where the formal state’s reach is partial and power often rests in the hands of brokers, a dynamic that certain political theorists such as Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat have recognized as a locus of political authority. Karachi’s violent political-economy is often linked with the reviled and corrupt figure of the land broker, his coercive and manipulative tactics for controlling land having spawned extensive media campaigns. In The Necessity of Corruption, Shiv Viswanathan compellingly reminds us that for the poor, the city’s economy often takes deceptive and manipulative forms. To enter the domain of urban life to survive it, the broker’s expertise becomes a catalogue for the poor to access the system. Corruption sustains the agency of the poor migrant; it is an ‘ethnoscience’ that combats the power and planning of the city, and it has at the centre the middleman or broker. Brokers dominate political life in Karachi’s unplanned settlements and their presence speaks of the highly localized nature of sovereignty. However, these ever-present strongmen’s sovereignty is recognized mostly within the borders of their own territorial influence, and their authority is frequently contested and renegotiated. Besides such shadowy figures there are others who also serve similar brokering functions centred on land conversions in the periphery. These are NGOs such as the Orangi Pilot Project– Research and Training Institute (OPP-RTI), which has emerged as a different kind of middleman in directing Karachi’s futures. By staving off demolitions and leading extensive mapping initiatives and water supply programs, and training ‘community architects’ in techniques of mapping and house construction, the NGO has managed to signify itself as an appointed representative of emergent communities. In March 2013, power struggles between organized crime groups such as the ‘water mafia’ and the OPP-RTI resulted in the director Perween Rahman’s targeted killing. This essay reflects on the complexity of urban life in Karachi through an analysis of how interactions between key state and non-state players influence urban expansion and enable homeownership for the poor. I focus on the practices of land brokers, state officials and an NGO in a marginal locality situated on Karachi’s north-western edges that border Baluchistan. I examine how these players compete, negotiate and collaborate to control and mobilize land for low-income groups. I argue this process is not determined solely by an elaborate neoliberal decentralization policy or through the effectiveness of a single vision inscribed in a city’s plan. This process is also predicated upon socio-political practices in which questions of sovereignty remain unsettled, and where alternative forms of power and authority shape urban life and compete with and complement state authority. In so doing, this essay explores a broader strategy of collaborative governance


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and community building that is shaping Karachi’s periphery. This process cannot be understood without placing the land broker and the NGO at the centre of the analysis. With the sway of formal state authority incomplete in the emergent settlements, this essay also interrogates the knotty relationship between the land broker and certain state officials I term land masters.2 Land masters such as the mukhtiarkar (head) and the tapedar (lowest functionary also known as patwari) are revenue officers in charge of obtaining taxes and maintaining land records of ownership for subdivisions within their administrative ambit. They have extensive knowledge about and jurisdiction over lands in the urbanizing periphery. For the poor, the process of making durable homes and communities in the periphery is inextricably bound with the knowledge and abilities that such figures possess. I call such officials ‘land masters’ because they represent the state as the chief controlling authority in the administration of land. Not surprisingly, land masters profit from the illicit dealings that are negotiated with land brokers. In describing the politics of urban expansion, I draw upon the case of two emergent settlements Medina Colony and Ramzan Goth situated in Gadap Town and Keamari Town, respectively. Taken together these sites represent complex alliances and adversarial/collaborative relationships between state and non-state players contesting for and reshaping the peri-urban landscape. They reveal the urban politics that buttress the efforts of the poor to become legitimate land and homeowners and, hence, propertied citizens. In examining the roles of the land broker and the NGO as community builders, I use the term ‘community’ in a distinctive way. I do not refer to community as a bona fide artefact sprouting from a cultural essence shared by a homogeneous group of people. Instead, I understand community as an ideology residents, brokers, community activists and NGOs invoke as a political tool to promote change. This change is expected or desired in the context of urban and political marginality and persistent state neglect, especially of marginalized groups such as the Baloch who have been the principal inhabitants of land in the peripheral regions.3 Community building then is a strategic tool that different social groups deploy as a means for collective advancement. In what follows, I first place my explorations in a historical context to delineate what is new and different in the current phase of planning and urban expansion. A point I wish to make is that earlier processes of urban expansion through squatting have given way to expansion through brokerage and land subdividing. Even though subdividing became dominant in the 1970s, I suggest today there is something newer afoot in terms of a neoliberal conjuncture that is witnessing not only the rise of NGO governance, but also an increased emphasis on a form of planning that pushes for gigantic urban projects necessitating the removal of unplanned settlements, and paving the way for a ‘world class city’ whose futures are inspired by Dubai and Singapore. The outcome for the urban poor has been further displacements. I then provide the empirical ethnography and demographics concerning the sites and discuss the individual cases. I finally conclude by asking to what extent new forms of claim making arising from complex alliances can be understood as a transformative politics that carries the potential for generating an inclusive urbanity. Historical context Today nearly 61% of Karachi’s residents live in unplanned settlements and approximately 80% of these reside in homes built on 120 square yards or less.4 Karachi’s unplanned settlements are the product of a specific historical context of intensified mobility and a postcolonial urban planning that has relied on colonial precedent in terms of its fundamental aversion to native city life.5


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In the aftermath of Partition in 1947, Karachi’s demographic dynamic changed considerably due to the influx of 600,000 Urdu-speaking Muslim refugee-migrants from the northern and western territories of India. Between 1947 and 1951 the city’s population increased by 145% triggering not only a massive housing crisis but also transforming the cityscape and political-economy.6 In subsequent decades the mounting and unmet demand for housing for low- and middle-income populations catalysed the emergence of unplanned settlements that obeyed no scientific principles of planning. This was not a violation of planning edict but an adjunct to the state’s plan. Thus the Karachi that was built as ‘planned’ grew in conjunction with the ‘unplanned’. For decades, this arrangement has enabled not only the criminalization of the poor who are the principal occupants of unplanned settlements, but also the proliferation of corruption, of bribes between state officials, brokers and politicians, and of outright state violence through evictions and demolitions. To a considerable extent unplanned settlements such as Orangi Town, Muhammed Khan Colony and Baldia Town were the handiwork of a new agent of social change, the land broker. With the support of the local police and revenue officials or land masters, the land broker has long controlled the subdivision of public land and plot sales to low- and middle-income markets. Table 1 provides figures on this growth within the past four decades of unplanned settlements. For the poor the search for affordable land and the dream of homeownership steadfastly depends on a system of appropriation of public land and its subsequent illegal subdivision and development by the land broker. This process has now outstripped an earlier mode prevalent in the fifties and sixties when the poor occupied land through invasion.7 Increasingly, a majority of unplanned settlements are located on the urban margins. This implies that akin to cities such as Sao Paolo, Karachi’s unplanned settlements too are the foremost areas where the working poor establish a residential foothold.8 Fundamentally, these are also a space where a steady supply of cheap labour can be found. The marginal localities that I focus on comprise new settlers from various regions: some displaced from the inner city either through evictions, or the burden of high rents, or the fear of everyday violence in neighbourhoods deeply afflicted by Karachi’s gang wars; others have arrived from Pakistan’s north-western tribal regions fleeing the trauma of khana jangi (civil war); still others have migrated from Punjab and rural Sindh in search of employment. Typically, a protracted and cumbersome search for land leads migrants via kinship networks to land brokers involved in the cutting, plotting and the selling of land. During conversations with residents in Ramzan Goth and Medina Colony, it was evident that almost 90% had purchased land directly from brokers who were either kin or were introduced to them through social networks. For the vast majority it had taken about 15 months to locate affordable land, ever more difficult to find in the inner city due to escalating values. But the threat of eviction, of state violence and of homes being Table 1.

Population of unplanned settlements.

Population Number of households % population Source: Hasan (2008).

1970s (1978)

1980s (1985)

1990s (1998)

2000s (2006)- Projected

2,000,000 227,000 55%

2,600,000 356,000 43%

4,901,067 700,152 50%

8,540,000 1,200,000 61%


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bulldozed was ever present. In a conversation Gul Bahadur, a Pakhtun and former rickshaw driver who now owns and operates a small dry goods store out of his home in Medina Colony, underscored the movement from the inner city to Karachi’s periphery as a key moment when his dream to own a bara ghar (big house) finally materialized. When I asked why he had selected this area, Gul historicized his settlement: I saw the jungle as an opportunity. My home was literally the third one here. Two other houses had already been built by a Sindhi and a Punjabi. My family and I had lived in a small flat for many years in Metroville. But I could no longer afford the rent. Earlier in a deal to buy land elsewhere in the city I lost 3 lakh rupees (US $2,800) on a plot that turned out to be contested. The broker had lied about the lease. Two years later in 2006, a friend told me about plot sales in Medina Colony. He introduced me to the dalaal who is a policeman from Hazara. At the time he was selling a 120 sq yd. plot for Rs. 50,000 (US $472). Today a plot sells for Rs. 1.5 lakh (US $1,418). My wife sold her jewelry; we took loans from family members and raised money through committees to purchase two 120 sq. yd. plots. We nearly lost the land when city government twice bulldozed this settlement, first in 2006 and then again in 2008. But OPP-RTI intervened and put a stop to the demolitions. We will soon get our lease. Now my extended family has also bought plots out here.9

These ongoing movements, transactions, demolitions and settlements on Karachi’s northern and western margins have converged with the state’s broader efforts in recent years to manage the challenge of Pakistan’s megacities, particularly their uncontrollable expansion through the proliferation of katchi abadis or unplanned settlements.10 During Pervez Musharraf’s military regime, the Planning Commission’s ambitious federal document Pakistan in the Twenty-first Century – Vision 2030 marked a major moment that gestured not only towards a new democratic and pluralistic Pakistan, but also to a reformed and restructured state that was set to recover through the implementation of local governance or decentralization. Noteworthy in this document was the emphasis placed for the first time on the future growth and management of urban centres.11 Efforts to strengthen local governance and accountability materialized in the Sindh Local Government Ordinance 2001 (SLGO), which undergirded the Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020 (KSDP), implemented in 2006. Declaring Karachi a city district, the SLGO subdivided the city into 18 Towns and 178 Union Councils, and fused all administrative institutions into the CDGK. Even though the SLGO was rendered dysfunctional after the military regime collapsed in 2008, taken together these plans have nevertheless been instruments of rule intended for the city and the nation to collectively move towards a new horizon. During Musharraf’s era planners had charted the potential Karachi, first imaged in the present through the lens of the Vision 2030 then remapped through the SLGO and the KSDP. Even though a guiding principle of the KSDP was the creation of an inclusive city, the main text of the plan emphasized inner-city regeneration, decentralization and the building of a ‘world class city’ that could attract footloose capital and be consumed. This blueprint for Karachi did not envisage developing a city with links to other cities in Pakistan, but a replication of Dubai or Singapore, a clean, safe city with gleaming skyscrapers but cleansed of the poor. Such city-making experiments have profound implications for the poor in unplanned settlements, mostly displacements. In 2011 in a Position Paper, CDGK master planners outlined an urgent need to achieve a ‘harmonious relationship’ between the congested and ‘degraded’ inner-city and the empty periphery.12 In Gadap Town, 2000 acres of land were earmarked for the relocation from the inner city of wholesale markets and warehouses to ‘decongest’ Karachi’s core. But much of this land has been subject to the imperatives of patronage


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politics and the manoeuvers of land masters and land brokers. As the Deputy District Officer in the Land Revenue Department explained, ‘The players and the regime may have changed but the game is still the same’.13 In effect, the periphery being shaped on ground is very different from the one imagined in the KSDP. If the KSDP has managed to proliferate through discourse and institutions to make its way into the lives of ordinary citizens, then its outcome has been driven and shaped by particular contexts and sociopolitical practices. Besides, Karachi’s notorious land grabbing and the associated violence has become part of a commodity process in which politicians and the military are also active rent seekers.14 Karachi’s unplanned settlements are a source of constant speculation amongst city officials and in the media.15 With the post-9/11 advent of the ‘war on terror’, the anxieties of an exodus of Pakhtun terrorists hiding in unplanned settlements and invading the peripheral belts keep alive a sensation of fear. In an interview with a foreign journalist, the former MQM-backed mayor of Karachi, Mustafa Kamal, deployed the classic trope of the ‘Pashtun fundamentalist’ plotting to take over the city: These Pashtuns means like fundamentalist — religiously fundamentalist, religiously extremist,” Kamal says. “They are coming in. When it comes to ethnicity, when it comes to Islam they all are … the same.” The mayor gives a tour of the area, driving past squatter neighborhoods and Islamic schools. He passes the area where the journalist Daniel Pearl was found slain. And he points out the window at a bearded man. “The man who’s coming in front of you … look at him, look at his face,” Kamal says. The mayor says he is convinced that Pashtuns are planning the locations of the illegal housing settlements. He says they are choosing strategic spots that block his own plans for the city. “It’s a very strategic location, you see?” Kamal asks. “The superhighway is there. They can control the whole highway. … They had a master plan before me. And they definitely have a master plan.16

Regions such as Gadap Town are situated close to the steep slopes of the Kirthar Mountains, which are often represented as spaces that offer escape routes to terrorists and mafia lords residing in yet another ‘deviant’ territory, neighbouring Baluchistan. These quarters represent uncrossable boundaries where migrants and marginalized ethnic groups are the penultimate transgressors of urban rationality. The trope of the Pakhtun fundamentalist also expediently dovetails into the narrative of Karachi’s ‘Talibanization’, a discourse that has nourished the MQM’s declarations to protect the city from the feared ‘outsider’ or terrorist. Interesting in the ex-mayor’s statement quoted above is how the master plan is placed at the centre stage of a narrative that pits the administrative expert against the unruly and singular form of the Pakhtun fundamentalist or the ‘slum-terrorist’. In so doing, the metanarrative of the ‘war on terror’ effortlessly slips into the account of the undisciplined, unplanned and anarchic city. While the rhetoric does not alter the ongoing dynamics of urban expansion through brokerage and subdivision, it nevertheless criminalizes working class settlements and justifies their targeting by paramilitary forces. For those who have been displaced or are already living in precarious conditions, these interventions or ‘cleansing operations’ make people’s lives more edgy, insecure and vulnerable. During a fresh round of fieldwork in June 2013, I learnt both Medina Colony and Ramzan Goth had been subjected to Rangers operations. In Medina Colony, 15 male residents had been rounded up, detained for two days and then released. Agitated and helpless, their wives had sat for hours at the local police station praying and pleading for their husbands’ release.


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NGOs, master maps In my meetings with Perween Rahman in the OPP-RTI’s office in Orangi Town, we had always sat in our customary spot: a capacious room, walls covered in gigantic maps, aerial surveys, and myriad photographs of sewers, lanes and sprawling settlements. In this extensive tableau of digitized grids, infrastructures, landscapes and demographics, Karachi’s spatial legibility unfolded as an index of communityscapes: ‘That there is Altafnagar and this is a community called Zobu Goth’, Perween would point on a master map that showed the location of over 2000 village-abadis. ‘This region shows in detail the urban expansion underway’.17 For the OPP-RTI the map was the preeminent mode of organizing and understanding Karachi’s complexity, to show the ‘hidden’ facts of the city, with the digitized ‘master map’ being a crucial evidence for advocating action to state officials on land tenure and policy change. Perween Rahman had spearheaded the OPP-RTI and its ambitious mapping of Karachi’s unplanned settlements.18 In the matrix of state-backed criminal networks, big bosses, land mafias, ward committees, and community-based organizations, Perween had become a ‘strong woman’ in her own right. Her targeted killing signalled the extent of the power struggles over land control and infrastructure in Karachi’s expanding frontier, and the important role the NGO has played in this transition. Since the early eighties, the OPP-RTI has emerged in Karachi’s Orangi Town, home to an estimated 1.2 million, to become part of this area’s dense institutional landscape. It is also part of an extensive global alliance of NGOs that advocate housing rights and building partnerships with the state for the delivery of municipal services. While the OPP-RTI’s broader programs pre-date Pakistan’s turn to liberalization, they nevertheless coincide with a newer policy agenda in which the state’s provision of welfare has been substantially reduced. The OPP-RTI is perhaps best known for its austere yet highly effective community-based, low-cost sanitation model. In Orangi Town, the project has benefitted over 100,000 households that represent approximately 90% of the settlement.19 The NGO has undertaken the extensive mapping not only of the sanitation infrastructure but more so of the villages and inchoate communities or abadis. The OPP-RTI’s maps came up unprompted in conversations with residents in Medina Colony and Ramzan Goth. These conversations concerned the thorny issue of how settlements could be made legible in the eyes of the state, and the maps were seen as a key instrument that enabled legibility. When asked about the reason behind the OPP-RTI’s decision to map villageabadis, Perween had explained: 2007 was a watershed year in Karachi’s history. That was when local government officials encroached on 850 acres of land in Gadap Town, razed villages, bulldozed abadis and built a new settlement called Altafnagar where MQM politicians have invested in land. To fight this, Baloch elders and local residents went to Muhammed Khan Afridi, a powerful land broker, asking him to put a stop to the evictions city government had started. Then they came to us asking we help map their land claims. That’s how we got involved. So this is why we now also map villages and new communities.20

Perween had added: ‘We put an end to the state’s aggressive encroachments in the periphery’. Another OPP-RTI representative underscored a significant step taken towards protecting Baloch goth elders’ claims was by helping them construct walls to protect villages that were open or not fenced off. Hence, this first step is understood as an assertion of proprietorship. However, the fear of displacement articulated by Baloch elders and new settlers such as Pakhtuns was also inflamed by the thousands of evictions that


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had taken place in 2007 during the construction of the Lyari Development Expressway in the inner city, and the aggressive advertising campaigns launched after 2005 concerning the construction of new property development schemes along Balochistan’s coastal regions.21 Between 2007 and 2008, the mobilization of low-income groups across the periphery enabled opposition parties such as the Awami National Party (ANP) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to mount a sustained campaign against the MQM’s incursions in regions such as Gadap Town, and pressed forward the OPP-RTI’s cartographic mapping of villages. These protests signalled a critical change in the city’s spatial-electoral politics: the emergence of new geographies of power centred on land, class and changing ethnic configurations that appeared to have divided the city centre from its ‘informally’ urbanizing hinterland. If, on the one hand, the city centre represents formal (secure tenure) settlements where the MQM locates its core support base (Urdu-speaking migrants from India), then, on the other hand, the peripheries are repositories of ethnically diverse settlements comprising low-income groups with insecure rights of tenure and dominated by political parties such as the PPP and ANP. In the next section, I turn to a discussion of land brokers’ and land masters’ roles in the acquisition and development of land as illustrated by the case of Ramzan Goth. The material for the case study is based on 60 semi-structured and detailed open-ended interviews conducted over an uninterrupted period of nine months from June 2011 to February 2012, and additional fieldwork from May to August 2013. Approximately 15 households were also surveyed for basic socioeconomic data. Planning an ‘unplanned settlement’ Planning unplanned settlements is a highly organized and collaborative process. It is predicated on continuous behind-the-scenes negotiations between brokers and land masters, with brokers also lobbying ministers and mayors for external sources of assistance for infrastructure provision. Here I present the case of Haji, Syed Hayat and Hanif who are Pakhtun land brokers or put simply tangible expressions of Karachi’s corrupt land mafia. They have subdivided and built a settlement spread across 40 acres of public land in the arid region of Keamari Town. Though this settlement is collectively named Gulshan-eBuner, Haji and Syed Hayat’s share in the cooperative venture is named Ramzan Goth, after the name of the Baloch village elder who sold the land. In November 2011, Hanif’s subdivision was demolished and his cousin Haji was imprisoned for several months.22 As it turned out, the Board of Revenue had sent the bulldozers and the mukhtiarkar had led the evictions. Ramzan Goth was spared mainly because Haji and Hayat had proof of purchase of land from village elders and paid jamanat (surety/bribe) to the mukhtiarkar. Hanif’s land title was in doubt as the land had exchanged several hands and he was not present the day the bulldozers arrived. In the absence of the Baloch goth elders’ testimony, Hanif’s settlement was entirely razed and approximately a dozen families were displaced. Ramzan Goth had quickly developed and was facing the possibility of securing 99-year leases, with Haji and Hayat making strong promises. Ramzan Goth has a resident population of 300 and 25 households. Typically, households consisted of joint families with several brothers, respective wives, children and grandparents residing together. Families had pooled incomes and resources to purchase 120 sq. yd. plots. Houses were being built incrementally based on the availability of funds or on interest-free loans provided by Haji and Hayat. The dominant linguistic groups were


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Pakhtun from Malakand District and Mardan in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa. Some residents belonged to the Mehsud and Wazir tribes and had fled districts like Tank, Wana and Sararogha in South Waziristan due to Taliban and Pakistan army-led incursions. For these migrants, the bleakness of male unemployment, the memory of distress migration, and the loss of homes and personal belongings point to the fragile survival of new settlers despite kinship networks that had enabled access to shelter. The lives of these poor households were touched by state violence in ways that suggest that the return to tribal lands remains uncertain. In July 2013, Ranger’s operations in Ramzan Goth had scared everyone. Nineteen-year-old Shazia, who has been living in the settlement since 2011, said: They came to see if there were any Taliban amongst us, hiding here. Checked for weapons. Came in three large vans. Knocked on door and shouted. We were scared. We let them in and immediately they told us not to feel scared that they were doing checks on all abadis. Made us open all the suitcases (she points to at least a dozen suitcases lined up against the walls of room); They asked, do you have any weapons? They checked the whole house and other homes in the abadi. Came at 7 am. We have heard they took away some men. 23

The vast majority of residents are nightwatchmen, rickshaw drivers, taxi drivers, unskilled labourers, thelay wallahs (hawkers), welders, construction workers and supervisors, and tea-men working in taverns and poultry farms located on the close-by Northern Bypass. Their wages ranged from Rs. 3000 (US $28) to Rs. 30,000 (US $280) per month, with several not earning a consistent monthly income and nearly all had outstanding debts. They were in their own words mazdoor peyshaa loag (labour class) who ‘cannot survive on rented accommodation because our earnings are too little’ (amdani kum hai). Settlers who had purchased land in the early phase of the development paid an average of Rs. 30,000 (US $282) per plot. During interviews it became apparent that previous housing experiences and future expectations had influenced residents’ decisions to settle in Ramzan Goth. Several residents had either experienced evictions or displacements elsewhere, or had rented cramped and expensive accommodation in the inner city. For these settlers the city had been a hostile place where they had had difficulty raising their families in peace. Not only had they endured the harassment of city bureaucrats and the police but also been prey to criminals and political party workers. In contrast to many new settlers, Haji, Syed Hayat and Hanif were not new to the city and possessed an intimate knowledge about its workings. They had migrated in the early nineties from a small cluster of villages situated below Malakand District. While their ties with the region remain strong, the decision to settle in Karachi reflected a familiar story of Pakhtun migrants: employment opportunities, education and access to healthcare, better infrastructure, and overall an improved standard of living. Haji’s primary karobaar (business) for 15 years was selling liquid petroleum gas (LPG). After getting his B-Com degree, Syed Hayat ran a rickshaw business and then went on to work as a money changer in the Karachi Stock Exchange. Both men’s children attend educational institutions in Karachi. Haji and Hayat also continue to co-manage a modest property business based on land they inherited from their respective fathers (salaried low-level civil servants). In 2002 the two men joined the Tablighi-Jamaat and realized that a noble route lay in welfare work.24 Subsequently, Hayat took a one-year dispensary course and worked in the Civil Hospital. The establishment of the Hayat Welfare Trust and a medical dispensary in Ramzan Goth was Syed Hayat’s initiative. In 2006 Haji’s LPG shop was sealed off on the orders of


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Wasih Jalil, the MQM-backed Town Nazim (mayor) of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, where the business was located. ‘Wasih Jalil ordered all Pathan businesses in Gulshan were to be shut down. We had to move out of our rented flats in Gulshan with our wives and children. Things there got bad for us’.25 It is difficult to estimate precisely how much Haji and Hayat have co-invested in planning Ramzan Goth since the beginnings, in 2010. In addition to paying goth elders money to purchase the land, the men also shelled out large sums for land registry, survey and lease fees, for setting up electricity and gas supply, ‘unofficially’ paid the local police who are on their payroll and established a trust for extending interest-free loans to residents. The most important challenge was formalizing the land title. This process hinged on mapping land claims, which the OPP-RTI had facilitated, and on striking a deal with the land masters who had helped identify vacant land. The men explained that to settle with the land masters they needed to negotiate a ‘rate of bribe’. This would secure 99-year leases for all households. Another alternative lay in soliciting the patronage of the then PPP-backed Sindh Chief Minister, and to transfer the land under the Sindh Goth Abad scheme. This scheme was first introduced in 1987 as an intervention to improve the physical conditions of villages and to enhance tenure rights. It became dormant in 1996 and was revived in 2008 under the PPP government. If the brokers succeed in bringing Ramzan Goth under the Goth Abad scheme, this would entail a payment of between Rs. 5000 (US $43) and Rs. 10,000 (US $86) per plot. At the time of this writing, the transfer was nearing completion. It is generally understood that those that subvert the rule of law and planning conventions constitute a land mafia that stealthily thwarts the master planner’s objectives by appropriating public land for speculative gain. Illegal activities encompass the outright grabbing of land often through violent means, and then its rapid subdivision and sale. In 19 January 2010, in an open letter to Pakistan’s Interior Minister, a leading Karachi-based NGO Shehri decried the power of the land mafia, systemic corruption and the targeted killing of activists who had resisted them.26 Under the former PPP (2008–2013) government, a name that frequently figured on the subject of illicit land dealings was President Zardari’s step-brother Owais Muzaffar ‘Tappi’. During fieldwork conversations, Haji and Hayat unavoidably turned to Tappi’s negotiations with land masters. The conversations centred on Tappi’s bribery of state officials to cheaply purchase land in Gadap and Keamari Town, land that had been earmarked for commercial development and middleincome housing schemes. Until recently, under the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz Sharif’s government, Tappi was serving as Minister for Local Government, Housing and Town Planning, and was also the Chairman of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board. He faces 150 court cases registered against him for ‘illegal matters in the revenue department’.27 When narrating Tappi’s illicit dealings, Hajji and Hayat were always quick to distinguish themselves from the politician, pointing out ‘We have never intended to profit from our land dealings’.28 Notwithstanding the ambiguous and illicit nature of the land broker’s activities and the attendant exploitative patron–client relations in which poor residents are often embedded, I take a cue from Hajji and Hayat and suggest that these agents also happen to be the principal organized voice for the marginalized in their localities. Land brokers are also community builders who have changed the nature of land development in Karachi. It is my contention that these social agents base their actions not only on personal stakes but also on a notion of common good, albeit one that is entangled in complex ways with processes of collusion, intimidation and deception. Commenting on the role of ‘big


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men’ such as the legendary Pakhtun land broker Muhammed Khan Afridi, Shamsuddin, a long-time community activist resident in Orangi Town, captured the on-ground sentiment:


Muhammed Khan is part of the land mafia because he takes over and illegally subdivides sarkar’s (state) land. But then we believe that someone like Khan is better because he doesn’t abandon the poor. Dalaals like Khan stick it out and deliver the whole package. They have taken over sarkar’s responsibilities because sarkar has failed to deliver. 29

The destruction of Hanif’s settlement spread across 30 acres of land purchased for Rs. 3 lakh (US $2800) per acre exemplifies the state’s recent anti-encroachment drive to control Karachi’s illegal expansion. Notably, this violence is meant to signal the state’s formal authority amidst mounting evidence of public sector corruption. For Hanif the state is a mafia that actively undermines the ability of ordinary citizens to build their lives, by forcing them into daily struggles of survival. An interesting aspect of this dynamic is how land masters play the role of doubleagents:30 on the one hand in unofficially supporting and negotiating with land brokers to help them gain control of land, and on the other in facilitating the entrepreneur-politician by evicting poor residents, or by selling public land to politicians. The Board of Revenue (BOR) land master is the double agent par excellence, complicit in effecting change from within a powerful institution while knowing that compromise is essential to the processes of land control. In their subversive practices, land masters denote an ambiguous political agency that exposes cracks in the dominant state apparatus.

From unplanned to Abadi Hanif, Haji and Hayat’s decision to participate in ‘subdivision mania’ in the periphery was not accidental. As members of Karachi’s well-established and increasingly powerful Pakhtun population, Haji and his associates were well-acquainted with Muhammed Khan Afridi, the legendary ‘big man’ whom they genially called Mamajii (Uncle). Afridi’s pro-poor stance is widely commended by NGOs and politicians. Now in his eighties, Afridi is seen as a champion who assisted hundreds of poor families in securing land and housing. Consequently, Afridi also commands an extensive vote bank and his political shrewdness enabled him to make inroads into leading political parties such as the MQM and PPP. Muhammed Khan colony, named after Afridi and where he currently resides, is a sprawling 3000 acre settlement sited not too far from Orangi Town. Inspired by Afridi and seeing an opportunity to co-invest in land, Hanif, Haji and Syed Hayat considered their cooperative venture in community building, an act of common good in which they had a stake. Hajji’s decision to solicit the Chief Minister’s help was rooted in a clear-cut appreciation of the local and national political economy. He explained that the emergent constituencies in Keamari Town were aligned predominantly with the PPP and the Jamat-ulema-Islam (JUI). Given his long-standing loyalty to the PPP and close association with the Member of National Assembly (MNA) and PPP’s Karachi president Abdul Qadir Patel, Hajji was firmly aligned with the party. Besides, as Syed Hayat, a JUI supporter, had pointed out at a time when the 2013 elections were still far-off, ‘It’s the PPP that’s in power’ (Hukoomut main hai). Nevertheless, Haji and Hayat were acutely aware of the negotiations to be had with those in power. When discussions turned to how gas and paved roads were going to be extended to Ramzan Goth, the men described:

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You have to imagine a system that operates like a hierarchy of men starting at the top from the MNA all the way down to his local representatives who have a vested interest in specific kinds of projects like building roads, providing gas, electricity etc. So say we go to the Gadap Town MNA after the announcement of the annual national budget. We explain we need a 2 km road in our settlement. The MNA will write a report and a few weeks later his representative will contact us saying the project has been approved and will cost approximately Rs. 1 crore (US $95,238). If we request a road nearer to election time the cost will shoot up to 2 crore (US $187,700). In reality 2 km road construction should fetch no more than Rs 50 lakh (US $47,614). We know because a private contractor gave us an assessment. In the government project the inflated sum helps line the pockets of various senators, the MNA and his representatives. And of course we’ll have to pay too. When the municipal engineer comes to check on the development of the road, he will say he comes to eat ‘fried chicken’. We will have to pay for that fried chicken.”31

In their narrative of the political-economic arrangements for delivering infrastructure in new settlements, Haji and Hayat expressed a mode of government that is undoubtedly corrupt and not subject to the ‘openness’ increasingly found in debates in the National Assembly.32 The men described a form of governance that goes against notions of public accountability and instead is ensconced in backroom discussions and clandestine negotiations. It is in these imperceptible spaces that boundaries between the state and society break down.33 Moreover, what the narrative also suggests is that the men understand the state’s routinized, bureaucratic practices and know how to deal with such processes. These men have a certain intimacy with power that frequently animates their conversations about the state’s presence in everyday life. These land brokers represent Karachi’s upwardly mobile and expanding Pakhtun middle class. The men seek not only to enhance their positions as land brokers but also their social standing within the broader Pakhtun community. They are younger and better educated editions of Muhammed Khan Afridi, and their control over land and access to local politicians and nazims solidifies and strengthens their power base. The residents in Ramzan Goth ask for and accept Haji and Hayat’s interventions because the men were acknowledged as ‘pious men’ (parhaiz gar loag) by virtue of their altruistic work (medical dispensary and trust), and as educated men of authority (seth) by virtue of their connections with state officials and politicians. Hajji and Hayat use their social capital with the view that by investing in social networks there will be expected returns. Return is imagined not only in terms of economic rents but also in terms of constructing a space of social prosperity on the margins of the city, distinguished from inner city areas increasingly characterized by conflict, displacements and escalating land values. Do the residents of Ramzan Goth share Hayat and Hajji’s vision? For resident informants, their motives in settling in the new scheme included issues of affordability, crime and incivility associated with inner city areas and a desire for security in a ‘respectable neighbourhood’. As one residentinformant asserted: Schemes like Defence Housing Society have given rich people security and a good standard of life. Why can’t we have the same? I want to live here because we have the chance to create our own community. Yes, it’s wilderness here right now. But it won’t be for long. We already have electricity and gas is also coming. Now we need water connection and a school for our children. We are only trying to survive, to get on with our lives.34


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Contests Lying south-east of Ramzan Goth and a 20-minute drive across the Northern Bypass is Medina Colony, a larger, more heterogeneous settlement comprising 300 households and situated in Gadap Town’s Union Council 8. Villages owned and occupied by Baloch migrants are now vanishing as land conversions become pervasive. Upwardly mobile village elders like Yar Mohammed, who is in his early seventies, explained to me that his sons wanted to get out of the land business, shift to Dubai and enter the import–export business with links in Singapore. Between 2006 and 2010, a section of this settlement, Zobu Goth, was demolished repeatedly by the city government from neighbouring Orangi Town, a key constituency for the MQM. The officials had included the head of the land department and the nazim. They had unofficially extended Orangi Town’s jurisdiction by literally swallowing up 850 acres of land that fell within the boundaries of Gadap Town. This triggered the destruction of several villages and the construction of a dual carriageway linked with the Northern Bypass. The continued threat of demolitions forced residents from Zobu Goth and adjacent goths to mobilize and solicit the support of the PPP-backed Gadap Town nazim Murtaza Baloch, and the OPP-RTI as well as Muhammed Khan Afridi. Afridi was well-acquainted with city government goondas as they had earlier clashed in a layn-dayn ka jaghra (a war of give-and-take). In 2007, Afridi and his men literally battled (air firing) with the Orangi Town naib nazim (deputy mayor) and the Station House Officer (SHO) in charge of the local police station in a dispute concerning the MQM’s encroachment of Afridi’s land. Eventually, the displaced residents of Zubu Goth as well as other villages were able to secure the intervention of the Sindh Chief Minister who had campaigned for the protection of goths. In January 2012, the PPP-backed Chief Minister invoking the old party rhetoric of roti, kapra aur makan (food, clothing, shelter) announced that over 1000 villages across Karachi’s periphery would receive leasing rights.35 Notably, this pre-national election (held in May 2013) rhetoric enabled the residents of Medina Colony (Figure 1) to attain their

Figure 1. (Colour online) Protest organized by residents of Zobu Goth in Medina Colony. Source: Orangi Pilot Project – RTI. The banner says: ‘We the residents of Zobu Goth, Gadap Town, appeal the Government of Sindh to grant us malkana hukook (ownership rights) for lease of land’.


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legal land title, and also provided the OPP-RTI an opportunity to create new communitybased programs such as the Secure Housing Program, Peoples’ Mapping Center and the Tameer Technical Center (TTC), which trains local youth in architecture, construction and mapping techniques. Even though ‘community architects’ have little influence on municipal planning, they nevertheless effectively support communities by providing the requisite skills for designing and building schools and houses. Since 2010, the TTC has completed 198 projects spread across emergent settlements. These programs work through ‘youth activists’ who organize residents, especially women, into collectivities by raising their consciousness and by mobilizing for social change and development. Youth activists are an integral part of the OPP-RTI’s community development agenda. The ‘youth’ are both male and female students with matric/intermediate qualifications. They are identified through local community networks to join the OPP-RTI’s training program, and are financially supported through scholarships and stipends. The said programs raise awareness and provide skills and information concerning rights and entitlements. Conclusion The story of Karachi in the twenty-first century is a story of the competition to define and control the city. As state authorities try to erase the superfluous migrant from the evolving peri-urban landscape, both new and old migrant-settlers struggle for their right to belong in the city. The struggles to assert housing and land rights and the path to homeownership for the poor are predicated on historically situated and contingent socio-political practices through which the city is constituted. These practices are embedded in discourses of corruption and in the imperceptible spaces where the boundaries between state and society break down. The contests and collaborations that draw NGOs, brokers and land masters into messy entanglements constitute new urban forms, orderings of property and citizenship arrangements. It is in the domain of ‘corrupt practices’ that negotiations between land masters and land brokers, politicians and NGOs determine the nature of land struggles, the legalizing of the poor’s precarious land claims and their dreams for homeownership. Particularly, it is in the sphere of these relations that the state is both represented and its legitimacy contested. All over the periphery from the ends of Keamari Town to Bin Qasim Town licit landholdings are based on appropriated public land. Land or specifically ‘property’ is being remade on ground through the actions of different state and non-state players who persuade and coerce others of their exclusive claims to land. NGOs such as the OPP-RTI have become deeply involved in mapping land transformations, a recent development predicated on the exigencies of a changing political economy and a post-liberalization phase of decentralized governance that has opened up the periphery for development. The NGO’s new function of mapping and surveying land is a representational endeavour that plays a crucial role in the transformation of land tenure, and in making marginalized populations visible to the state. The OPP-RTI’s practices also represent an accounting of rights and objects, the effect being a disciplining of space and the reconstruction of land rights. In examining the land transformations on Karachi’s periphery, I have called the emergent settlements ‘communities’. I understand community as an ideology that residents, brokers, activists and NGOs invoke as a political tool to promote change. This change is expected in the context of political marginality and persistent state neglect and state violence. Community-based politics is a strategy whose roots can be traced to the



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genealogy of Karachi’s unplanned settlements or to the handiwork of land brokers, land masters and now even NGOs who are shaping the peri-urban landscape. In so doing, they have inadvertently opened up a new frontier of place-based contests, and radicalized ordinary citizens into becoming more organized in their own development. The land contests and efforts to construct the inchoate communities of Medina Colony and Ramzan Goth are emblematic of residents struggling to become legitimate landowners in the eyes of the state and, hence, full citizens. The overall introduction in Pakistan of the discourse of democracy resonates with the rights-based schemes introduced much earlier to grant land tenure rights to Karachi’s poor. I refer here to the Sindh Katchi Abadis Act 1985 that was an outcome of the first PPP government’s populist policies led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the seventies. I also refer to the Sindh Goth Abad Scheme first implemented in 1987 under General Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. That politicians, municipal agents and land masters now collaborate with the OPP-RTI to facilitate land legalization schemes hints at a certain irony: the state’s control is now being insisted upon and extended over regions in the periphery that had formally escaped its jurisdiction. In reflecting about an inclusive urbanity, these dynamics problematize the notion of ‘inclusivity’, specifically one that legitimates state domination. It is uncertain as to what extent figures of authority such as Afridi, Hajii and Hayat will be exchanged for the state. To whom will the residents of these inchoate communities eventually pledge loyalty? Will the brokers’ dominion collapse? These questions demand deeper investigations in Karachi’s emergent settlements in the new-fangled periphery.

Acknowledgements I am deeply thankful to Liza Weinstein for an earlier critical reading of this essay and to the two anonymous reviewers for SAHC. This essay has also benefitted from extended discussions with Aradhana Sharma. I am especially grateful to those who were interviewed and welcomed me into their homes.

Notes 1. In Pakistan the word dalaal literally translates as pimp. A seamier definition is someone who trades women for sex. There is extensive scholarship on the role of land brokers in Latin America, Middle East and India. See Singerman’s study of the sha’bi communities of Cairo; Weinstein’s investigation of land mafias in Mumbai; and Handelman’s research on Santiago’s squatter settlements. 2. I am not the first to use the term ‘land master’. See, for instance, Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation, where this term is used to describe the role of state officials in controlling urban land development in China. 3. The Baloch population has since independence been conceptualized in terms of marginality. The spatial distancing of this population from the centre of Karachi’s urban politics reflects their ideological rift from the centre of Pakistan’s national identity-making process. 4. Hasan, Housing Security and Related Issues. 5. Daechsel, “Seeing like an Expert, Failing like a State?” 6. Hasan, Housing Security and Related Issues; Ansari, Life after Partition. 7. Lindern & Selier, Karachi. 8. Holston, Insurgent Citizenship. 9. Interview, July 19, 2013. Known as bisees, the committees are thrift groups or a risk mitigation strategy. Neighbours (men and women) voluntarily come together in a bisee to pool small savings. Once the funds have reached certain levels, members take turns drawing on the money. Typically the money is then used to buy essential household commodities; to build a wall or a roof of a house; or pay off outstanding debts.


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10. Planning Commission, Task Force Report on Urban Development. 11. Planning Commission, Pakistan in the 21st Century. 12. CDGK (2011) Position Paper on Shifting of Whole Sale Markets from City Center to Areas along Karachi Northern By-Pass, Master Plan Group of Offices, City District Government Karachi, September. 13. Interview, February 20, 2012. 14. Anwar, “State Power, Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier”; Siddiqa, Military Inc. 15. “Katchi abadis are hubs for crime, disease” Express Tribune, March 28, 2012; “Taliban spread terror in Karachi, says report”, http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/Pakistan/Talibanspread-terror-in-Karachi-says-report/Article1-1035192.aspx, accessed October 16, 2013. 16. Interview with National Public Radio’s (NPR) Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep on June 5, 2008, published as part of the special series The urban frontier: Karachi - ‘’. 17. Interview, March 20, 2011. On the power politics of mapping, see Pinder, “Subverting Cartography.” 18. Rahman et al., Lessons from Karachi; Hasan, “Orangi Pilot Project.” 19. Rahman et al., Lessons from Karachi. 20. Interview, January 15, 2012. 21. During Musharraf’s regime Rs. 120 billion worth of ‘mega projects’ were publicized to bring to Baluchistan a new era of prosperity. Certain projects envisaged the reconfiguration of areas like Gwadar into a modernized port with new commercial, industrial and residential spaces. But on ground these visions encompassed the displacement of old fishing communities and working class populations. See Budhani and Mallah, MegaProjects in Baluchistan. 22. The BoR’s objective was to instil fear in everyone (sab ko darayaa gaya). 23. Interview, July 14, 2013. 24. Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is a religious movement founded in India during colonial rule. Within Pakistan, the TJ is considered an apolitical group that attracts large number of people and is ethnically and socially diverse. It emphasizes the idea of bringing back into Islam a purified mode of practice and belief. See Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? 25. Interview with Haji Sahib, November 15, 2011 26. Internet version accessed May 5, 2012 at http://teeth.com.pk/blog/2010/01/19/a-open-letter-forrehman-malik-2 27. International News Network. “Karachi unrest case: Who is Owais ‘Tappi’ Muzaffar, SC asks”, March 1, 2013. http://www.onlinenews.com.pk/details.php?newsid=218594&catname=1 28. Interview, December 23, 2011. 29. Interview with Shamsuddin, January 18, 2012. 30. I do not deploy this term as Roy has done in Poverty Capital. I see the land master as a figure that deliberately obfuscates the planning process. 31. Interview, October 5, 2011. 32. Part of Pakistan’s Parliament, the National Assembly is the lower house elected for a five-year term on the basis of adult franchise. 33. Fuller and Benei, The Everyday State and Society in Modern India; Gupta, “The discourse of corruption.” 34. Interview, August 20, 2011. 35. This action was predictable given national elections were scheduled for the following year.

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City District Government Karachi (CDGK). Position Paper on Shifting of Whole Sale Markets from City Center to areas along Karachi Northern By-Pass (17 CDGK Projects). Karachi: Master Plan Group of Offices, City District Government Karachi, 2011. Daechsel, Markus. “Seeing like an Expert, Failing like a State? Interpreting the fate of a satellite town in early post-colonial Pakistan.” In Colonial and Postcolonial Governance of Islam: Continuities and Ruptures, edited by V. Bader M. Maussen, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. Express Tribune. 2011. “Karachi Politics: Make Space for the Pashtuns.” Express Tribune, July 16. Accessed September 15, 2011. http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/7034/karachi-politics-makespace-for-the-pashtuns/. Express Tribune. 2012. “1300 Villagers Gear Up for a Fight with DHA, Sindh Government.” Express Tribune, May 18. Accessed August 5, 2012. http://tribune.com.pk/story/380451/ 13000-villagers-gear-up-for-fight-with-dha-sindh-govt/. Express Tribune. 2012. “Katchi Abadis Are Hubs for Crime, Disease.” Express Tribune, March 28. Accessed June 10, 2012. http://tribune.com.pk/story/356143/katchi-abadis-are-hubs-for-crimedisease/. Fuller, C. J., and Veronique Benei. The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. London: Hurst & Company, 2001. Gupta, Akhil. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 375–402. doi: 10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00090 Handelman, H. “The Political Mobilization of Urban Squatter Settlements: Santiago’s Recent Experience and its Implications for Urban Research.” Latin American Research Review 10, no. 2 (1975): 35–72. Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Hasan, Arif. Housing Security and Related Issues: The Case of Karachi. October 16, 2008. Accessed January 7, 2011. http://arifhasan.org/human-settlements/land-housing/housingsecurity-and-related-issues-the-case-of-karachi-3. Hasan, Arif. “Orangi Pilot Project: The Expansion of Work beyond Orangi and the Mapping of Informal Settlements and Infrastructure.” Environment & Urbanization 18, no. 2 (2006): 451– 480. doi: 10.1177/0956247806069626 The Herald. Out of Options. Karachi: Dawn Group, 2006. Hindustantimes. Taliban Spreads Terror in Karachi, Says Report. March 31, 2013. Accessed October 16, 2013. http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/taliban-spread-terror-in-karachi-saysreport/article1-1035192.aspx. Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Iqtidar, Humeira. Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at – e- Islami and Jama’at – ud- Da’wa in Urban Pakistan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Lindern, Jan Van der, and Selier Frits. (eds.). Karachi: Migrants, Housing and Housing Policy. Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1991. NPR. 2008 “Karachi’s Growth Fuels Demand for Illegal Housing.” Edited by by Steve Inskeep. Mustafa Kamal’s Interview with National Public Radio’s Morning Edition Host Published in Special Series the Urban Frontier: Karachi. Accessed May 17, 2012. http://www.npr.org/2008/ 06/05/91175223/karachis-growth-fuels-demand-for-illegal-housing?ps=rs Pinder, D. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City.” Environment and Planning A 28, no. 3 (1996): 405–427. doi: 10.1068/a280405 Planning Commission, Government of Pakistan. Pakistan in the 21st Century: Vision 2030. Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 2007. Planning Commission, Government of Pakistan. Task Force Report on Urban Development. Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, 2011. Rahman, Perween, Asif Pervaiz, and Arif Hasan. “Lessons from Karachi: The Role of Demonstration, Documentation, Mapping and Relationship Building in Advocacy for Improved Urban Municipal Services.” IIED Report, London: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 2008. Roy, Ananya. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. London: Routledge, 2010.

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Siddiqa, Ayesha. Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. London: Pluto Press, 2007. Singerman, Diane. Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Visvanathan, Shiv. “The Necessity of Corruption.” Seminar 590, (2008). Accessed May 20, 2013. http://www.india-seminar.com/2008/590/590_shiv_visvanathan.htm Weinstein, Liza. “Mumbai’s Development Mafias: Globalization, Organized Crime and Land Development.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 1 (2008): 22–39. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00766.x You-tein, Hsing. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2010.