Producing cosmopolitan Karachi: freedom, security and urban redevelopment in the post-colonial metropolis

Abstract

Pakistan’s urban transformations are rarely discussed in relation to its changing political-economic conjunctures and new aesthetic sensibilities. Over the past decade, Pakistan’s leading metropolis, Karachi, has witnessed the impact of numerous projects that have sought to mould a new avatar backed by corporatist visions of a world-class city. These configurations articulate not only a new architectural aesthetic but also a state-nationalist vision of a consuming Pakistani modernity. In this article, we focus on how developments such as the widely acclaimed eco-friendly retail and entertainment complex the Port Grand, whose construction was conceived and led by a corporate-cultural entrepreneur and the Karachi Port Trust (KPT), are transforming decaying waterfronts, reimagining Karachi’s history and directing new urban futures in Pakistan. We argue that the emergent activities of urban redevelopment function on the basis of a new spatial logic that endeavours to produce a ‘sanitized’ and ‘secure’ cosmopolitan city through which a proactive desire for modernity is expressed. But this process also eliminates the undesirable and underprivileged from the new image of the world-class city. Such urban experiments reinvent the city by reinforcing a spatial partitioning of the landscape and by commodifying history now staged as ‘colonial nostalgia’ in spaces recreated for corporate taste and the metro elite.