Title:
Multiplicity of Land Owning Agencies, and its role in the development of
Informal Settlements in Karachi.
Author:
Saeed Ud Din Ahmed.
Abstract
The fast growth of urban population in the developing countries has made the international
planning and development agencies and planners to ponder upon the urban future of the
world. Urban informality is under the close analysis of the researchers as it has become a
generalised urban pattern of the global south (Roy, 2005). Karachi is an important city in the
global south, because of its strategic location in the region and as the economic backbone for
the country (Hasan et al, 2013). It’s a city with almost 18 million population, whose needs of
land and shelter are taken care of by twenty (20) planning and development agencies (CDGK,
2007), but still, almost half of the population lives in the informal settlements (Hasan and
Shakir, 2003; CDGK, 2007). The study proposes to look at the issues of Informality as the
shortcoming and failure of formal planning agencies and processes. This article is focused on
the decentralized institutional structure of planning and development of urban land in Karachi,
that comprise of autonomous and semi-autonomous multiple land owning agencies having
various levels of rights to plan, develop and manage the urban land without any hierarchical or
centralised coordinating mechanism, and its links with the issue of informal settlements. It
argues that the multiplicity of land owning, planning and development agencies without any
centralised coordinating mechanism within Karachi, has been and continues to be, one of the
major reasons of issues in planning and management of the city, more importantly, as the
reason of emergence of Informal settlements. This concept enables us to analyse the role
formality in the emergence of informality, more specifically with respect to shortcomings in the
formal planning institutional structure. On contextual level, this article explore the possibility,
as how to make these multiple land owning agencies to look beyond their boundaries of
jurisdiction as responsible for issues related to land market in the wider city, and eventually, to
make them contribute in solving these issues.