Urbanization, Gender & Violence in Millennial Karachi: a Scoping Study
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Environment, Politics and Development Working Paper Series Department of Geography, King’s College London _______________________________________________________________ Year 2013 Paper # 66 _______________________________________________________________ Urbanization, Gender & Violence in Millennial Karachi: A Scoping Study Dr Nausheen H.Anwar, Dr Daanish Mustafa, Ms Sarwat Viqar, Ms Amiera Sawas, Dr Humeira Iqtidar Department of Geography, King’s College London ©2013 by the Author(s) This paper is posted at King’s College London, Department of Geography at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/geography/research/epd/workingpapers.aspx Urbanization, Gender & Violence in Millennial Karachi: A Scoping Study Lead Author: Dr. Nausheen H. Anwar Co-Authors: Dr. Daanish Mustafa, Ms. Sarwat Viqar, Ms. LeadAmiera Author: Sawas Dr., Nausheen H. Dr. Humeira Iqtidar Anwar Co-Authors: Dr. Daanish Mustafa, Ms. Sarwat Viqar, Ms. Amiera Sawas, Dr. Humeira Iqtidar February 2014 Urbanization, Gender & Violence in Millennial Karachi: SAIC Scoping Study Contents 1. Executive Summary ................................................................................... 3 1.1 Study Context and Research Agenda ........................................................ 3 1.2 Key Findings of this Scoping Study .......................................................... 4 Literature review ............................................................................................................ 4 Media Analysis ............................................................................................................... 6 1.3 Primary Research Agenda ........................................................................ 7 2. Introduction .............................................................................................. 8 2.1 What is The SAIC project ........................................................................ 8 2.2 Purpose and objectives ........................................................................... 10 2.3 Methodology ......................................................................................... 10 3. Urbanization in Pakistan ......................................................................... 11 3.1 Trends in Urbanization in Pakistan ........................................................ 12 Natural Change ........................................................................................... 13 Migration .................................................................................................... 16 Governance ................................................................................................ 20 Urban Sprawl .............................................................................................. 22 3.2 The Impacts of Urbanization in Karachi ................................................. 23 3.3 Planning Karachi ................................................................................... 27 4. Basic services and Infrastructure ................................................................ 34 4.1 Summary of Basic Services ..................................................................... 34 4.2 Water, Sanitation, Hygiene (WASH) and Health .................................... 37 4.3 NGO Landscape in Karachi and Types of Assistance .............................. 40 5. Violence in Pakistan’s Urban Centers ........................................................ 43 5.1 Types of Violence included in this Study ................................................. 43 5.2 Media representation of gender & violence in Karachi ............................ 48 5.3 Summary of Findings ............................................................................................. 57 5.4 Gender and Violence in Karachi ............................................................. 65 6. Vulnerability and social capital ................................................................. 72 6.1 Definitions of vulnerability ..................................................................... 72 6.2 Measuring vulnerability – tools and populations ..................................... 72 6.3 Karachi’s vulnerable populations ............................................................ 73 6.4 Definitions of social capital .................................................................... 75 7. Conclusions and Recommendations ............................................................ 83 7.1 Geographical areas proposed for this project ........................................... 83 7.2 Key stakeholders .................................................................................... 86 7.3 Gaps & Way forward ............................................................................. 86 References ...................................................................................................... 87 2 Urbanization, Gender & Violence in Millennial Karachi: SAIC Scoping Study 1. Executive Summary 1.1 Study Context and Research Agenda This scoping study is part of a research project entitled ‘Gender and Violence in Urban Pakistan’. This is one of 15 projects being conducted across the world which form the larger Safe and Inclusive Cities Project (SAIC). Co-funded by the International Development Research Center in Canada (IDRC) and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), SAIC is directed towards understanding the drivers of violence in the urban areas of the global South so as to inform evidence-based policy making for safe and inclusive cities. This project, on urban Pakistan, focuses on the material and discursive drivers of gender roles and their relevance to configuring violent geographies specifically among urban working class neighbourhoods of Karachi and the twin cities of Rawalpindi/ Islamabad. The research is primarily concerned with investigating how frustrated gendered expectations may be complicit in driving different types of violence in urban areas. The project is also concerned with addressing first, the material aspects of gender roles through improved access to public services and opportunities, and second, discursive aspects of gender roles in terms of public discourse, education and media. The purpose of this scoping study is to bring together existing knowledge on the process of urbanization, and the interplay of gender roles, vulnerabilities, and violence in Pakistan. With an awareness of existing knowledge and knowledge gaps, the research team has been able to form a research protocol with a view to exploring known links and gaps in knowledge on the aforementioned themes. Methodologically, the study undertakes a review of the academic and policy related literatures, combined with a 3 month media analysis of selected print !and online newspapers, television and radio which are relevant to national and local discourses about violence in Rawalpindi-Islamabad. By undertaking an analysis of such links between urbanization and violence, this study concludes that various types of urban geographies and the associated infrastructure therein enable or produce distinct forms of violence in Pakistan. In definitional terms, violence here is understood as the use of or threat of physical force in attaining particular aims. This understanding of violence allows an analytical distinction between ‘violence as a product’ and ‘violence as a process’. 3 Urbanization, Gender & Violence in Millennial Karachi: SAIC Scoping Study An accompanying expansion of focus led to the inclusion not only of spectacular forms of violence (like terrorism), which is quite common in Pakistan, but also the much more common, persistent and understudied forms of everyday violence. 1.2 Key Findings of this Scoping Study i) Literature review Types of violence The review of available literature carried out in this study reveals that everyday violence is often seen taking three distinct manifestations: • Spectacular violence - that instills fear and destroys or transforms geographical places and spaces; • Infrastructural violence - violence generated through the organization of space and infrastructure in particular ways; • Violence of disempowerment - flowing from Arendt (1973), is violence as loss of power. There is a fourth type of violence often seen in the literature, i.e. structural violence, but for a variety of reasons this type will not be covered in this project. Vulnerability-Violence Nexus A more informed analysis of risks and specifically the geographical dimensions of violence could be understood by utilizing the concept of vulnerability. The term here is taken to mean the susceptibility to suffer damage from environmental hazards and extremes, and the ability of households and communities to recover from them. Hence ethnicity, class, gender, age, and associated political economy factors are central to this particular understanding. Based on recent developments within the field, the Vulnerabilities and Capacities Index (VCI) (Mustafa et al, 2010) has been selected as an appropriate metric to assess the vulnerability profiles of households and the neighbourhoods chosen for this research project. Social Capital Quality and Violence 4 Urbanization, Gender & Violence in Millennial Karachi: SAIC Scoping Study The final area of focus is a review of the literature on social capital, and the various ways that the concept has been studied in the context of urbanization, gender, and violence. This discussion opens up several interesting questions such as: • Can social capital