Karachi, as we know it, appeared in a blink. Nineteenth-century maps show a dot labelled Karachi, or “Kurrachee”.
But this place was a tiny fraction of the city that exists today. At the end of World War II, Karachi’s population was around 400,000.
Today, it’s at least 13 million, one of the larger cities in the world. Once, I saw this giant metropolis from the roof of the old city hall.
The building is an arch-windowed, rambling pile of reddish stone, which dates to the era when the British controlled Karachi as part of their Indian empire.
Its design blends the cultures of rulers and ruled. The businesslike lower floors could be facing some European square, but on the roof, I was standing amid a series of South Asian onion-shaped domes.
A flock of birds settled on the dome to my right, clustering up near the point. A city employee beckoned me to a door.
It led us into the clock tower. We barely had room to step inside, because the floor was covered with thousands of municipal documents – building designs, memos on land use, and maps from the previous century.
Past administrations had filed the old papers by dumping them in a pile so enormous that it interfered with the dangling weights that drove the clock.
Stepping over dusty pages at the edge of the pile, we climbed the stairs that circled the clockworks and emerged on a balcony below a clock face.
Karachi lay below us like an unfolded map. Motorcycles whined on the street below. One of the office buildings to my right was covered in checkerboard squares of yellow and black.
To my left, busy streets stretched away until they vanished in the haze. The low buildings that lined those streets were shades of khaki and gray, their colours washed out by pollution and the sun.
Eight miles away, I knew, the broad streets cut through North Karachi, which was built in the 1960s as a distant suburb.
The expanding city promptly filled the intervening space. Then it continued beyond. Today, many people live in New Karachi, a sprawling area to the north of North Karachi.
Others live miles farther north, in areas even newer than New Karachi. What spread out before me was an instant city – a metropolis that has grown so rapidly that a returning visitor from a few decades ago would scarcely recognise it.
The instant city retains some of its original character and architecture, like Karachi’s city hall, but has expanded so much that the new overshadows the old.
For most of history, the overwhelming majority of the world’s people lived in the countryside. The global population remained heavily rural even after American and European cities industrialised and grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Now the balance has shifted within the span of a single life. Since the aftermath of World War II, the urban population has grown by close to 3 billion people.
Urban dwellers became a majority of the global population around 2008, and many urban areas are still growing.
This trend has produced the instant city, which I define as a metropolitan area that’s grown since 1945 at a substantially higher rate than the population of the country to which it belongs.
In the United States, the population has doubled, but Los Angeles and its suburbs more than tripled. Houston has expanded more than six fold, and its exuberant growth is modest compared with the developing world.
Istanbul is about 10 times its previous size. Ürümqi, a business hub for western China, is about 23 times more populous than the estimate for 1950.
And then there’s Karachi. Conservative estimates suggest that it’s at least 30 times larger than in 1945 – meaning that there are at least 30 residents today for everyone at the war’s end.
This kind of growth reflects more than natural increase in the number of births over deaths. It’s true that the global population ballooned in recent decades, an epic trend that contributes massively to the expansion of cities like Karachi.
But that’s not the whole story. The city has grown too quickly for that. Modern cities also add population by sprawling into rural areas, which is part of what I was seeing from the clock tower.
Karachi swallowed hundreds of villages that used to be miles out in the countryside. But even this cannot fully explain the instant city.
Something more is happening. The city is attracting migrants. People arrive from rural areas or from other countries.
They work in new industries and build new homes. They bring diverse customs, languages, or religious practices, and they make the older inhabitants tense.
Lifelong residents and newcomers alike jostle for power and resources in a swiftly evolving landscape that disorients them all.
In recent decades, the most significant movements to cities have come in Africa and Asia. Karachi has been a destination for some of the most dramatic migrations of all.
No one metropolis could capture the full variety of the world’s growing cities, but Karachi is representative in several ways.
It’s on the Asian coastline, where massive urban growth is under way. Its modern foundations were laid during the age of European colonialism.
Its great expansion coincided with the post-war collapse of empire, when industrialisation attracted people to the city – as did the desperation of people seeking shelter from political or economic catastrophes.
And it’s surprising to learn how often Karachi’s course has been influenced by trends, ideas, or investment from other cities. It’s a listening post where we can take in a global conversation.
Within this one metropolis, we find a range of possible options for the future of the instant city. Travelling across the landscape visible from the city hall balcony, we can encounter anything from shining glass towers to chaotic violence.
Lately, Karachi has seen a little more glass, and a lot more violence. Migrants have come from all over Pakistan, concentrating the energies and sorrows of an entire troubled nation in one place under the sun.
What follows is the story of a single day in Karachi’s life. It was a date that almost everyone in Karachi remembered.
Many vividly recalled where they were and what they were doing. I set out to learn the events of that day, the history that led up to it, and the aftershocks and consequences that followed.
It’s a slice of the urban world we’ve all been building. From the clock tower, I saw the place where the story begins.
It’s just down the street from the old city hall. A white marker, next to the faded paint of a crosswalk. The marker was recently made. It’s a memorial stone.
Extracted from the book ‘Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi’ authored by Steve Inskeep.
