Four settlements in Karachi

In Karachi, as in much of the rest of Asia, there is pressure on poorer groups to move out of central locations, or at least into high-rise apartments. This isn’t what the residents typically want, or can afford, but poverty doesn’t fit with Karachi’s aspirations to become a ‘world-class city’, and as in most other cities poor groups get little support from policymakers.

Securing a good location is all the more difficult because low-density housing takes up large amounts of valuable space, and high-density housing is prohibited. Even with very small plots, settlements are not meant to contain more than 1200 people per hectare, and with bigger plots the limit declines to less than 500pph. Officially this is because higher densities undermine residents’ health and wellbeing. But are these limits really suitable?

For the study, Arif Hasan, Asiya Sadiq and Suneela Ahmed looked at four lower-income housing sites in Karachi. Three are settlements with houses built up on small plots. Khuda Ki Basti was only settled recently and is still only lightly populated. Nawalane is old and extremely dense. 

Paposh Nagar lies somewhere between these extremes. The fourth settlement studied, Fahad Square, is an apartment complex.

As described in the working paper, household surveys were undertaken in each of these settlements, densities were calculated and mapped, and the settlements were hypothetically redesigned via computer modelling to explore whether, with the right sort of support, high densities could have been achieved in such settlements with relatively low-rise, flexible, high-density housing design.