The problems with high-rise construction in Karachi

By Subuk Hasnain and Moosa Kaleem

(Note: This article was originally published in the Herald’s July 2019 issue as a special report, under the headline “Getting High” )

Karachi is a whore

with whom every eligible man, descending from the mountains

or emerging from the plains and deserts, with wallets of different sizes,

spends the night. In the morning,

slapping her on one cheek, he expects the other one, and leaves for work,

drunk in anticipation of the night to come.

— Parveen Shakir

The Fire

A dead man is laying on a concrete pavement that cuts across Karachi’s University Road. Nobody seems to know him. It is also not known when he died or for how long his body has been laying there.

A taxi driver familiar with the area says the dead man must have been a heroin addict. This part of the city, he says, is particularly full of drug users.

An ambulance run by a private charity arrives to pick up the body. It is attempting to make a U-turn on a one- way road. Sirens blare, horns honk and people shout at the vehicle struggling to navigate – the wrong way – a path that is already jam-packed.

A few minutes later, the road clears up and is unusually quiet. The silence lasts for a little while and then the vehicle  of a very important person zooms past — a jet-black SUV gleaming under Karachi’s late-afternoon sun. Two police vans are frantically following it.

If one stands where the dead man lay and looks southwest, a high-rise building – Noor Trade Centre – can be spotted on the right. Just a couple of weeks ago, on the afternoon of March 21 this year, a fire in this high-rise building led to two deaths.

***

He runs down the staircase and passes a young scrawny man who says something loudly about “20 minutes”. As the word travels up, he continues to run down, following a man in a white dress shirt and jeans who, in an agitated voice, repeatedly says: “keep moving; move forward”. That man then stops at one of the floors and turns to an office space on his right, perhaps to alert the people there.

He, however, keeps going down — one floor after the other. The marble floors are covered in dust. The wall along the staircase is dusty too, except where the hands of people scurrying down have touched it. He sees a large plastic bottle laying on its side, a fire extinguisher left abandoned next to it and a door ajar. Whoever was here has given up.

There is nobody near the elevators on any floor. Smoke is spreading everywhere. He turns around and finds a long queue of young men going down like him. Some have covered their faces to avoid inhaling smoke. One of them holds something close to his chest. It looks like an office file. Three staffers of a private rescue service are carrying a stretcher up the stairs. One of them hands him a water bottle and tells him to drink it. Another rescuer touches the wall and claps the dust off his hands.

His breathing becomes harder and he begins to cough. This is where a video of the fire incident inside Noor Trade Centre ends.

Nearly 50 people waited to be rescued on the roof of the 12-storey commercial building when the fire was raging down below. Some of them would be brought down with the help of long ropes. Others would be rescued by Pakistan Navy helicopters, according to a report by a television channel.

On the ground, traffic came to a halt as people gathered around the building — mostly just to watch it burn. As fire tenders scrambled to extinguish the fire, police officials could be seen giving interviews to news channels.

Four fire tenders and two snorkels worked on the site. Karachi’s fire brigade, overseen by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, is not equipped to extinguish fires in buildings higher than seven floors. In the absence of suitable equipment, all kinds of makeshift means were being employed for fighting the fire.

Noor Trade Centre is like any other high-rise in Karachi. Its blue and gray façade blends in with other buildings on either side of University Road. Right above the entrance to the building, a large tangle of electricity wires hangs low, jumbled together. This is a common sight at multi-storey buildings everywhere in Karachi.

Unsurprisingly, the fire at Noor Trade Centre was ignited by a short circuit on the fourth floor. The smoke then spread through an air duct, entering every floor. Since the building also does not have an emergency exit, those trying to get out of it during the fire and the rescuers both had to use its lone staircase –— slowing down evacuation and rescue operations. Desperate to get out of the burning building, a few people had to jump out of its windows. Two of them died on the spot.

The main reason for such fatal accidents in high-rises is poor maintenance, says Zafar Ahsan, head of Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) which is responsible for overseeing construction all over the province. This maintenance, he says, is the sole responsibility of associations that residents form to run multi-storey buildings.

SBCA, according to him, also does not have the legal authority to get electrical and plumbing drawings along with architectural and structural drawings before approving any multi-storey building. “Regulations in this regards are not available,” he says.

There are strict regulations, though, for emergency stairs. No multi-storey “building is approved without the provision of emergency stairs,” says Ahsan. “But the space for [these] exits is generally occupied and misused by the builders or residents,” he adds. Where SBCA fails, he acknowledges, is in “monitoring” such violations and also in the “implementation” of rules and regulations to penalise the violators.

The Fall

A 23-storey building in Karachi’s Boat Basin area has been under construction for a few years. One-third of its façade is covered in tinted glass sheets — with a cable lift hanging around its central floors.

Part of a large banner hanging from the half-finished building reads: “Pursuit of engineering transcendence” –— ostensibly eulogising its builder’s track record. Another banner, carrying text in Urdu, is hanging closer to the building’s ground floor. It says: “Due to an accident, this building has been sealed. Please avoid going inside it or coming near it. Whoever fails to comply, will have to face the law.”

On March 9 this year, six labourers were perched on a cable lift parked on the building’s 13th floor. They were fixing a glass sheet in a panel. Suddenly, a cable supporting the lift snapped, reads a First Information Report registered by the police. The labourers – Riaz Israr Shah, Abdul Rehman Israr, Faisal Islam, Asad Muslimuddin, Shehryar Abrar and Museeb Hasan – all came crashing down as the lift gave way. Three of them died instantly. The others were taken to a hospital in critical condition. They, too, did not survive long. News media later reported that the cables used in the lift were faulty and outdated. The lift is also said to be carrying double as many people as it had the capacity to carry. Both the builder and the construction contractor were arrested, and faced charges of criminal negligence.

The case against them was over in just a few weeks though. In an out of court settlement, they paid an unspecified amount of money to the families of the deceased labourers as compensation and got out of detention.

The construction on the building is yet to resume.

City View

Amal, 22, has been living on the 10th-floor of City View apartments since 2001. On a recent early summer day, she, along with three of her friends, is waiting for an elevator on the ground floor of the building located right across from Karachi’s British-era Empress Market. They start talking about an elderly man who once entered the elevator and immediately started chanting God’s name. “He kept saying bismillah over and over again,” one of the girls says as others try to hold back their laughter so they do not attract too much attention.

The elevator is so worn out that sometimes they, too, fear to step into it. If it refuses to move, they will have no option but to climb 10 floors to get to Amal’s place. One of them winces as she remembers the time she had to do so. Worse still, the elevator can randomly stop functioning  in the middle of its course. Even when it keeps moving up and down, it requires being manually opened and closed at every floor. The wait time, therefore, can be long.

There are 14 apartments on each floor of City View apartments, Amal says. If, on average, five people live in each apartment, then 70 people are living on each floor — and 910 in the entire 13-floor building. It has a mixed population — Urdu-speakers, Sindhi-speakers, Pashto- speakers. Of late, a large number of young doctors have also been living here. They are doing house jobs and residencies.

City View apartments is among the earliest multi-  storey structures to emerge around Empress Market after high-rises were first allowed in this area under Karachi Development Authority Master Plan, 1974-1985. Today, this part of the city has several such buildings, most of them with the same living conditions as those inside City View apartments. Many others are at various stages of construction.

Some of the problems facing City View apartments are structural. It was originally designed and built as    a 10-storey structure but three more floors were later added to it, increasing the load on its foundations and infrastructure.

The city authorities seem to be aware of that.

When an anti-encroachment operation took place in the Empress Market area during the last two months of 2018, Amal’s family – as well as other residents of City View apartments – received a notice. Cantonment Board Karachi, the civic body responsible for this part of Karachi, informed them that three floors of their building would be demolished because a) they were built illegally and b) the building is crumbling under their weight.

The builders and the residents sought time from the government to remove the illegal floors on their own and also carry out the required maintenance work. You can already see some changes, Amal points out.

The entrance is being renovated, a marble staircase is being built and the seepage that has flooded parking space on the ground floor is being fixed, she says. Many other defects inside the apartments, however, are not being probed properly, let alone addressed. When, for instance, Amal recently had her cupboard rebuilt, she found water leaking into it as well.

These innumerable big and small flaws will only worsen when the illegal floors are finally demolished. Most parts of the building are highly unlikely to withstand the impact of demolition, making it dangerous for its residents. “Where is everyone supposed to go?” someone asks at Amal’s flat. Apart from its structural problems, City View apartments have also seen many fires and multiple other accidents in recent times, Amal recalls. A young boy fell into an air duct that was not sealed properly (a common occurrence in high-rise buildings, just like short circuits) and a girl committed suicide by jumping from the 12th floor.

The Ban

On March 2 – around a week before six labourers died in a building accident at Boat Basin and two weeks before Noor Trade Centre was sealed indefinitely – Prime Minister Imran Khan announced his urban regeneration plan in a series of tweets. “…we are in the process of making laws to allow buildings, built to international safety standards, to go as high as in other cities across the world,” he wrote. “My vision for our future cities: to allow buildings to rise vertically & allow for more green spaces as [Pakistan] is one of the most environmentally-threatened countries.”

The idea of a vertical expansion of built structures is obviously not new. It essentially emerged out of necessity. When the Great Chicago Fire broke out on October 8, 1871, it killed around 300 people and left close to 100,000 people homeless. The three-day fire burnt everything in its way, singeing more than 2,000 acres of the city’s land and destroying its business district completely.

The population of Chicago is said to have sky-rocketed not too long after the disaster, jumping from 300,000 to one million in only two decades. This increased the demand for land in the city so the developers decided to build upward. This is how the first sky scrapers or high-rises are said to have emerged. Home Insurance Building, a 10-floor high- rise, remained the tallest building in Chicago for a few years before it was matched – and then outmatched – by other buildings in the same city as well as in New York.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who is more generally known as Le Corbusier and who was born in Switzerland in 1887 but became a French citizen in 1930, is commonly believed to have made high-rises fashionable outside the United States. He advocated building upward so that more space on the ground could be utilised for greenery, say Mansoor Raza and Saeed Uddin Ahmed who teach urban planning at Karachi’s NED University. Jeanneret’s plans were meant to “decongest the city centre”, make it “more accessible while increasing mobility”, and “increase the provision of parks and open space,” wrote London-based researcher and urban planner Alexi Ferster Marmot in her paper, The Legacy of Le Corbusier and High-Rise Housing.

“The sky scraper first appeared in [Corbusier’s] 1920 project for a ‘City of Towers’ and composed the centerpiece of his Ville Contemporaine for three million inhabitants,” she stated. “The sketches for that project provided designers with a powerful series of images of a city crowned by towers.”

Egyptian academic and researcher Ibrahim Mostafa Eldemery offers different definitions of a high-rise building in a paper, High-Rise Buildings – Needs and Impacts, which he wrote for World  Building Congress 2007. The first  of these defines a high-rise as a building that has “a small footprint, small roof area, and very tall facades”. According to another, what differentiates a building from the conventional low-rise and  medium-rise  buildings is that “it needs special engineering systems due to its height.” A third definition states that a “high-rise is any structure where the height can have a significant impact on evacuation” in cases of emergency.

Once a building gets higher than fifth or sixth floor, it becomes different not just in terms of accessibility, as Eldemery has pointed out, but also in terms of its structure and the materials required to sustain it, says NED’s Ahmed. It is because of these considerations that buildings that have seven floors or more are known as high-rises.

Due to the peculiar nature of such buildings, it is never easy to provide their residents with such civic amenities as tap water, electricity and natural gas. This difficulty explains why, during the hearing of a case in March 2017 on deteriorating sanitary conditions in Karachi, the Supreme Court of Pakistan imposed a ban on the construction of high-rise buildings in the entire Sindh province. The court restrained SBCA and cantonment boards from approving building plans for any new high-rises and multi-storey commercial and residential projects.

Two months later, SBCA complied with the order by imposing a complete ban in Karachi on the construction of any building that would have more than ground-plus-two floors. The Association of Builders and Developers (Abad), a Pakistan-wide industry body, has challenged this restriction in the Supreme Court.

As of now, says Abad chairman Muhammad Hassan Bakhshi, Karachi has more than 1,000 high-rise and multi- storey buildings. “SBCA is still to grant approval to more than 300 other such buildings,” he says.

If laws were fully implemented, many of the existing high-rises would not have been even built, Sindh Local Government Minister Saeed Ghani recently suggested at a session of Sindh Assembly. “Around 50 per cent of the buildings in Karachi are against the rules,” he said and held SBCA “responsible for it”.

A building can be illegal due to a number of reasons: a) if it is built on a plot not meant to be residential or commercial; b) if it is constructed on more space than that mentioned in its approved plan; c) if it has more floors than it was allowed to have; d) if it violates the approved ratio between its built area and open spaces; e) if it changes its approved floor plan to utilise parking space, emergency exits and other common areas for residential and commercial purposes.

SBCA has laid down procedures to check whether a building has violated any rules and regulations. If it is seen as having abided by most of them, it gets a completion certificate. A small percentage of violation is tolerated, says a lawyer who helps builders procure documentation they require. But, he says, many builders violate many more rules and regulations and still manage to get a completion certificate. As a result, the final structure of a building is never the same as was approved.

SBCA chief Ahsan admits “there are black sheep” in his department who, “in collusion with the builder mafia”, do not report violations of building plans and specification “within specified time”. The builders, he says, then “occupy such buildings constructed in violation of the plan and specification without obtaining completion plan/occupancy certificate from SBCA”.

Karachi’s mayor Wasim Akhtar also blames this state of affairs on malpractices within SBCA. But the real culprit, in his opinion, is Sindh’s provincial government which abolished Karachi Building Control Authority in 2011 and has, instead, created SBCA. In theory, this change means that building rules and regulations will uniformly apply across the province now. In practice, he says, this has taken away the focus from Karachi which is not just Sindh’s but Pakistan’s largest urban space.

Ahsan acknowledges that SBCA is facing “many problems and difficulties” in overseeing construction in an entire province. “Approximately 2,000 employees are working with SBCA,” he says, “and its director general and other senior directors often visit the regional offices but administrative control and monitoring of the working from the headquarters [in Karachi] is very difficult.”

The City by the Sea

In 2007, Karachi’s city district government prepared what it called the Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020. The plan envisaged that the city’s population will go up to 27.5 million over the next 13 years. Another organisation, Japan International Corporation Agency – that conducted a survey for a mass transit system for the city – states that Karachi will be the world’s second largest city after Tokyo by 2030 if it continues to grow at its current rate. This massive growth in population is fuelled by a ceaseless arrival of migrants to Karachi from other parts of Pakistan. Consequently, the number of households in the city is rapidly increasing. According to one estimate, the number of households in Karachi in 2005 was approximately 2.1 million but it is expected to increase to 3.9 million by 2020. These numbers suggest the city would require around 1.8 million housing units during these 15 years — a staggering 120,000 houses in one year.

In order to fulfil these requirements, Karachi has already expanded enormously in recent decades. Today, its total area stands at 3,527 square kilometres, expanding at an annual rate of 6,780 acres. The city will soon need to acquire land from its nearby divisions if this growth rate continues.

Abad’s chairman sums up this situation when he says that “rapidly developing cities have less land to accommodate heavy population.” That is why, he says, “governments are allowing high-rises [because these] are the only solution to accommodate the influx of people towards cities.”

Urban planner Farhan Anwar as well as Raza and Ahmed of NED University also agree that high-rises could resolve some of the land-related problems Karachi faces. These are necessary for a city like Karachi which has little room left to expand horizontally, says Anwar.

But every urban planner cautions that high-rises may create more problems than they solve. If the city authorities do not focus on a strict implementation of rules and regulation as well as on the provision of infrastructure required to live and work in a healthy environment in high-rises, these buildings will only change the lives of their residents for the worse, says Anwar.

Most of the existing multi-storey buildings in Karachi already show how the failure to provide basic facilities – such as parking lots, emergency exits, functioning lifts, safe electric wiring, sealed air ducts, effective water and sewerage systems – to their residents is causing accidents and making living conditions inside them as insufferable. Poorly managed traffic and the failure to collect and dispose solid waste are some of the other problems being caused by high-rises.

Karachi City Climate Change: Adaptation Strategy, a report written by Anwar in collaboration with Shehri: Citizens for a better environment, a non-profit organisation, links high-rises with the problems caused by population density too. “In many old and new areas, apartment buildings, 5-6 storeys high, have replaced the low-density bungalow  housing,” the report states. This means that “the population density within the core of the city is on the rise and is projected to increase even further in the next decade and more,” it adds and then warns: “There is a strong relationship between density of population and intensity of the urban heat island.”

This “heat island” emerges when increased human activity leads to increased change to the land surface, trapping heat and reducing ventilation. It is one of the problems that Tokyo is already facing. With taller buildings blocking wind, Karachi, too, is expected to get hotter than it already is.

A World Class Metropolis

In 2010, Sindh government passed the Sindh High Density Development Board law to “identify and earmark the high density zones in the urban centers of the cities of the province and in consultation with respective utility agencies…” These zones were to be used for building more high-rises.

Shehri has highlighted multiple flaws in this piece of legislation. The law permits “enhanced building sizes on existing plots (up to 12 times more), amalgamation of plots (no size is specified), commercialisation of residential properties, elimination of possible setbacks such as ventilation and sunlight penetration, and inadequate parking spaces,” the organisation pointed out at a seminar. “Improving utility services, and physical and social infrastructures required to carry out these projects have been disregarded,” it said, adding that the over- exploitation of the city will destroy its social fabric and turn it into a concrete jungle.

Some changes for the worse have already taken place in and around areas where high-rise buildings stand. For one, traffic is becoming extremely chaotic due to  the twin effects of a lack of parking space within these buildings and an extremely rapid increase in the number of individually owned and driven vehicles in Karachi. The latter can be gauged from the fact that only five per cent of all vehicles plying in the city can be categorised as public transport.

The mushroom growth of high-rise buildings in particular and construction activities in general are also resulting in a rapid disappearance of green spaces from Karachi. As of now, the city’s total vegetation cover is only seven per cent of its land mass – 62,643 acres out of a total of 907,001 acres – according to People and the Land Empowering Communities for Social Justice: Rural Karachi - A Case Study published by Shehri. It may get worse if the city authorities cannot make the builders and developers follow rules and regulations.

The overall living conditions in the city are already so bad that the Supreme Court, too, has taken note of them. Justices Gulzar Ahmed and Mazhar Alam Khan Miankhel, two members of a bench of the court, observed in May this year that Karachi looked like a big slum. They said:

“There are no trees, no greenery, no parks, no playgrounds, no roads, no hospitals, no universities, no schools, no colleges except those which were made by the government somewhere about 40 years ago… No water, no sewerage, no safe and secure and decent recreation and shopping areas. There is on all roads katcha or pukka dirt, filth, heaps of garbage, sewerage water, defaced walls, incomplete and unpainted ghostly haunted structures, ruined buildings in state of imminent collapse, stray dogs menace, no fumigation of the city to rid itself form dangerous life- threatening germs and mosquitoes. Graveyard spaces have become scarce… It is no more a city of lights which is being portrayed by the city administration nor is this the city of gardens. Karachi has no semblance of a city rather it looks like a big chunk of a slum.”

The area between Johar Mor and Johar Chowrangi – a distance of around one kilometre – exemplifies the problems highlighted by the apex court. An estimated 70,000 apartments stand on either side of the road connecting the two points. Since most apartment buildings here have left no space in them for recreation, shopping and community activities, their residents spill over onto the road during most of the day – and also night – for shopping and eating out. This increases traffic congestion and produces solid waste that is way more than a few municipal workers deployed in the area can handle.

***

Alya*, 26, lives on the fourth floor of a 15-storey apartment block in a posh Clifton neighbourhood on a street that looks out onto a new jetty being constructed in the Arabian Sea.

Her family moved to Clifton because every important place is easily accessible from this part of Karachi. Her mother can take her religious learning classes in nearby Defence Housing Authority (DHA), her late father worked on I I Chundrigar Road in Saddar which is only a few kilometres from Clifton. The same is the case for her brother who attends the Institute of Business Management which is in Korangi Creek. Alya herself could go to school and then to college easily — in DHA and Clifton respectively. All these places are more than an hour drive from Gulshan- e-Iqbal where she lived three years ago.

Her family is saving not just time but also money. From spending up to 60,000 rupees on transportation every month, they now spend up to 20,000 rupees. This has made a huge difference, she says.

Apart from these benefits, Alya is also experiencing the bad side of living in a high-rise in a pricey neighbourhood. She believes the city owned her and she owned it back the ground floor of City View apartments undergoing maintenance when she lived in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. “I still avoid saying that I live in Clifton because people think that you are detached from the rest of the city if you live in richer areas like Clifton or they think that you belong to a different class from them,” she says.

High-rises are changing social attitudes in some other ways as well.

Both Amal and Alya have heard about vehicles getting stolen from their respective buildings but they do not even know the names of their fellow residents who have lost those vehicles. In a traditional neighbourhood, everyone living on a street would know each other and also commiserated with each other in the case of any loss.

Urban planner Ahmed says living in high-rises does lead to a high degree of aloofness. “The higher you go, the more distant you become from your physical environment and the people around you,” he says.

In a low slung neighbourhood, you can leave your child to play in the street because you trust your neighbours, he says. “You will be familiar with who is coming into your neighbourhood and who is going out,” he adds. “Those living in high-rises, on the other hand, remain insular.”

*The name has been changed to protect the source’s identity