A Tale of Three Cities
Karachi is in a state of shocked silence as bulldozers roam its
streets pulling down shops and buildings and nurseries considered illegal,
reducing them to rubble in a matter of hours. While few dispute their legality,
and for years, a number of watchdog organizations have been highlighting
encroachments on amenity plots, pavements and illegal buildings, it’s the
suddenness of it that has caught everyone on the back foot.
It draws attention to the experience of other cities across the
world, today admired for their modernity, smooth management and livability.
Looking at three cities – London, New York and Paris, gives important context
to the current efforts in Karachi. All three cities were amassing wealth and
power through colonization and trade in the 19C, yet all three were dark, dingy,
filthy and filled with crime and poverty. In many ways they present a much
grimmer picture than present day Karachi.
PARIS
The French Revolution of 1789 had overthrown the French aristocracy,
and the word “ poor” was eliminated in the new political vocabulary, yet the most wretched poverty continued.
In 1845, the French social reformer Victor Considerant wrote:
"Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence
and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate. Paris is
a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish, and where, of seven small
infants, four die during the course of the year." A single room could have
as many as 20 persons living in it. Its narrow streets were barely navigable by
horse driven carts and wagons.
Napoleon Bonaparte efforts at change were cut short by his exile "If only the heavens had given me twenty
more years of rule and a little leisure," he wrote while in exile on Saint
Helena, "one would vainly search today for the old Paris; nothing would
remain of it but vestiges.”
His nephew Louis- Napoleon Bonaparte, the first elected president
engaged Georges Eugene Haussmann in 1853 to remake Paris as the modern city we
know today. Over 17 years, he gutted the old Paris, ran broad boulevards through it financed by
real estate speculators, displacing 350,000 people and their businesses. He demolished 19,730 buildings, constructed
215,300 new apartments but rents increased three hundred percent. The rich occupied only three percent of residences, yet in the
aftermath of the disruption, Paris saw
the fastest population growth of the time.
While old Parisians like Victor Hugo were dismayed, other
Europeans were full of praise calling Haussmann a brilliant modern urban
developer. He developed the broad
avenues lined with new elegantly designed five story buildings with the now distinctive
wrought iron balconies, city squares, parks, a comprehensive sewerage system, a
new aqueduct for fresh water, a network of underground gas pipes for lighting
streets and buildings, elaborate fountains, public lavatories and rows of newly
planted trees, new railway stations, the Paris Opera House, new schools,
churches, theatres, food markets and the iconic Arc de Triomphe with its
12 radiating avenues.
He engaged a large team of architects, engineers, labourers, and
landscape gardeners.
It cost the equivalent of 75 billion euros. Yet when he retired he
lived in a modestly rented apartment having
also demolished the house he was born in.
When in 1944, Adolf Hitler gave orders for the wholesale
demolition of Paris, the German military governor Major General Dietrich von
Choltitz refused to obey. Paris was simply too beautiful to destroy. .
LONDON
The streets of 19 C London were covered in the dung of horses, the
air was filled with soot and smoke, the Thames was full of human refuse and
rubbish. A city of extremes like Paris,
the slum areas of London were unlivable even by 19 C standards.
Whole families were crammed into single rooms with communal cooking facilities. Those who could not pay
rent slept in doss houses in beds called coffins, for a few pence. At half the
price they could sleep sitting, with a
rope strung across to lean over. Toilets
were a few outhouses for large tenement buildings, leaking through the walls of
adjoining homes. Water for cooking and laundry was provided by communal
standpipes with people queuing and fighting to get their turn during the few
hours it was available. Mixing of drinking water with sewage led to a cholera
breakout in 1831 killing 6000 people .
The unusually hot summer of 1858 came to be known as TheGreat
Stink. The stench from the River Thames
was so strong that Parliament had to be held behind lime soaked curtains. It
galvanized legislation to find a solution to the sewage system. Joseph Bazalgette, an engineer with a
background in land drainage methods, was hired,
and history acknowledges his extraordinary
feat of engineering
In 1875, the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act gave local
authorities powers to buy up, clear and redevelop slum areas, as well as
requiring them to re-house inhabitants. The prosperous moved out of town
centres to the new suburbs, while much of the housing for the poor was
demolished for commercial spaces, or to make way for the railway stations and
lines that appeared from the 1840s.
Ebenezer Howard proposed the Garden City concept to improve the quality of life, “the peaceful path to real reform” a
central city surrounded by satellite towns, that linked nature to urban
areas. It was to be funded by private
companies based on a system of 5% philanthropy who would purchase large tracts
of land for development of residences
and infrastructure in trust for the future residents.
Unlike the 17 intense years of Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris, the
clean up of London took decades
interrupted, and to some extent aided,
by the destruction of two World Wars
that necessitated rebuilding on a
wide scale.
NEW YORK
New York streets of the 19 C were full of rubbish, horse manure,
dead animals, food waste and discarded household items and reeking with human
excreta . It was not until 1895 that the municipality started collecting
rubbish. The soil cart men collected
human soil from outhouses at night disposing it into the surrounding waterways
or in the harbor.
Journalist Jacob Riis took photographs of the slums of New York in
the 1890s that shocked many Americans with the images of extreme poverty at a
time of great economic prosperity for the few.
The Five Points was a legendary slum in 19th century New York. It
was known for street gangs, gambling
dens, violent saloons, and houses of prostitution that even shocked Charles
Dickens
The city was in the grip of unscrupulous developers, who held sway
over all city matters, and cultivated police corruption.
The city was finally taken over by a new Mayor, William Strong,
who vowed to improve living conditions in New York. A Civil War veteran, George
Waring, was asked to take over street cleaning. He said, “I’ll do it under one
condition – you leave me alone. If you want to fire me, of course, that’s your
right. But I will appoint and hire the people I feel are best for the job, not
because they’re people you want to do favors for.” He created a militaristic
management with specific tasks and areas for his crew who had white uniforms to
create the image of hygiene. Initially there was hostility from the poor
localities, and needed police protection, until residents began to appreciate
cleaner neighbourhoods.
Women played a pivotal
role. Well to do women motivated the poorer women who scavenged for food on the
streets, as well lobbying politicians.
Teddy Roosevelt, later to become President of America, took on
reform of the Police Department. One of his first actions was to walk around
the streets at night with the journalist Jacon Riis, hauling up officers asleep
on duty which caused a sensation. In the heat wave he made officers distribute
ice. He constantly came into conflict with
powerful corrupt police officers who had amassed huge fortunes, and political
groups. Burnt out, he left after two years, unable to make much headway. It was not until as President, Roosevelt’s New
Deal funding in the late 1930s , and the strong mayorship of La Guardia, that infrastructural
development and order finally came to New
York.
Paris had the most radical makeover, with the whole city other
than the Marais being entirely rebuilt. London made changes through a
continuous process of legislation. New York transformed through engagement with
the citizenry.
Each city has some aspect of their problems that will be familiar
in the context of Karachi. All three cities
transformed themselves into modern cities by the middle of the 20th Century,
with the state taking responsibility for ensuring their functionality.
As times have changed, it is probably no longer possible to take
an authoritarian approach. The economy
of cities has also changed considerably. The Belgium based Cities Alliance, a global
partnership formed jointly by the World Bank and the United Nations Centre for
Human Settlements, addresses the issue of slums with a number of suggestions.
Rural development as an alternative to movement to urban centres is seen as ineffective. It rejects the displacing of the poor to the
suburbs or edges of the city and instead recommends improving the
infrastructure by engaging with communities and giving them a stake in
development such that eviction is not a fear. To encourage long term investment
in improvements by the residents and providing slum
dwellers with the economic, social, institutional and community services
available to other citizens such as housing, streets, footpaths, drainage,
clean water, sanitation, and sewage disposal. Their experience shows slum
upgrading promotes economic development , inclusivity, improves quality of
life, reduces poverty and health and thus raises the value of the city as a
whole.
Clearly there are many alternatives and complexities to be considered by those reshaping
Karachi to avoiding replacing one type
of chaos with another, and ensuring
economic sustainability and quality of life.
Durriya Kazi
January 31, 2019
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