When Pakistan came into existence in August 1947, Karachi was a city of roughly 435,000 people. Within months, its population changed dramatically. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees arrived from India after Partition, seeking shelter, employment and security in the new country’s capital.
The city’s infrastructure, housing stock and public services had never been designed to absorb such numbers in such a short time. The shortage of housing that Karachi experiences today has its roots in those first years after Independence.
The newly established government faced an emergency unlike any it had encountered before. Refugees were accommodated in schools, military barracks, public buildings and temporary camps. Many forcibly occupied abandoned properties left behind by Hindus and Sikhs who had migrated to India. Others erected makeshift shelters on vacant land. These arrangements were intended to be temporary, but many became permanent as the demand for affordable housing continued to grow.
Karachi’s population more than doubled within a few years. By the 1951 Census, the city’s population had reached over one million people. Migration continued throughout the following decade, as people arrived not only from India but also from Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or KP) and Balochistan in search of work. The city was becoming Pakistan’s major commercial and administrative hub, but its housing policy failed to keep pace with its population growth.
More than 60 percent of Karachi’s population now lives in informal neighbourhoods because of the scarcity of affordable planned housing. Karachi’s housing crisis began with the city’s explosive growth after Partition and has persisted through seven decades of ambitious plans, failed resettlement schemes and shifting housing policies. The history of the city’s failed interventions reveals a recurring lesson: housing cannot be separated from employment, transport, education and social networks. Can the city’s policymakers learn from the mistakes of the past? And what can be done to house people in Pakistan’s largest metropolis?
INITIAL ATTEMPTS AT HOUSING
The government’s first response focused on building formal housing. Pakistan Quarters, Martin Quarters, Federal B Area, Paposh Nagar and several other residential schemes were developed during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
These projects demonstrated that the state recognised the housing shortage, but they were never designed to meet the needs of the majority. Most units were built for government officers and public servants rather than low-income households or newly arrived migrants. The people facing the greatest housing insecurity remained largely outside the formal system.
Recognising that Karachi needed long-term planning, the government commissioned the Greater Karachi Plan, prepared by the Swedish consulting firm Merz Rendel Vatten (MRV) and published in 1951. It was the city’s first comprehensive master plan. The plan proposed a structured expansion of Karachi through satellite towns, industrial areas, improved transport links and planned residential neighbourhoods. It attempted to guide future growth rather than simply respond to immediate crises.
The plan reflected many of the planning ideas popular at the time. It assumed that urban growth could be managed through comprehensive planning, zoning regulations and large-scale public investment. Satellite settlements were expected to reduce pressure on the city centre, while new infrastructure would accommodate future population growth.
The proposals were technically ambitious, but they also depended on financial resources and administrative capacity that Pakistan simply did not possess during its early years. As a result, much of the master plan remained on paper. Karachi continued to grow, but it grew largely outside the framework envisioned by the planners.
THE RISE OF KATCHI ABADIS
This gap between planning and reality has become a defining feature of Karachi’s development. Population growth was immediate. Planning operated slowly. Families in need of shelter could not wait for housing schemes that required years of surveys, land acquisition, financing and construction. They solved the problem themselves.
Throughout the 1950s, informal settlements began to appear across the city. These settlements, later known as katchi abadis, were not simply the result of illegal occupation, as they are often described. They reflected the absence of affordable alternatives. For many low-income households, the choice was never between formal housing and informal housing. It was between informal housing and no housing at all.
Many policymakers viewed these settlements as planning failures or illegal encroachments. Residents viewed them differently.
Over time, they provided access to employment, schools, transport and social networks that distant government housing often failed to offer. Location mattered as much as shelter. A family earning daily wages could not afford to live many kilometres away from its workplace simply because housing happened to be available there.
THE LANDHI-KORANGI INTERVENTION
During the late 1950s, the government attempted another major intervention through the Landhi-Korangi Township Scheme as part of the greater Karachi resettlement plan. This was initiated under the military government of Gen Ayub Khan and developed with support from the Ford Foundation and planned by Doxiadis, an internationally acclaimed planner.
The plan aimed to resettle tens of thousands of refugee families living in informal settlements close to the city centre. It was one of the largest resettlement programmes undertaken in Pakistan. The Landhi-Korangi Township Scheme proposed the construction of around 40,000 houses in two satellite towns for refugees and low-income families. However, only about 10,000 houses were completed before the project was discontinued.
The settlements were located on the outskirts of Karachi, with the expectation being that nearby planned industrial zones would develop to provide employment. This did not happen, forcing most residents to continue travelling to the city for work. The long commute increased transport costs, wasted valuable time and reduced employment opportunities, particularly for women.
It also placed additional pressure on Karachi’s transport network, with Saddar — where most jobs were located at that time — becoming the main transport hub, leading to overcrowded bus terminals and the growth of informal markets that served daily commuters.
Residents were expected to pay for their one-room houses through monthly instalments, which would finance a revolving fund for future housing. However, residents were unable to keep up with the payments because of poor employment opportunities and the cost of commuting. Without a functioning revolving fund, the program became financially unsustainable and was eventually abandoned, achieving only a fraction of its original target.
There is another aspect to this project. The settlements created are uni-ethnic, and the residents are all working class. This creates homogenous settlements that have similar political views and affiliations, and enhances the development of stronger political conflicts, as evident in the violence in Karachi in the 1990s.
The commute that created the informal markets of Saddar also led to the displacements of those markets when the courts declared them to be illegal and passed orders that they should be demolished, adversely affecting Karachi’s street economy and increasing poverty and alienation among its various protagonists.
The Landhi-Korangi scheme reflected a different planning philosophy. Instead of allowing informal settlements to expand, the state would relocate residents to planned townships equipped with roads, schools and basic services. On paper, the approach appeared rational. In practice, it exposed a problem that continues to shape urban policy today.
This experience challenged a common assumption in urban planning: that housing could be treated as an isolated problem. In reality, housing is closely linked with employment, transport, education and social networks. People choose where to live not only because of the quality of a house but also because of its relationship to the rest of their lives.
These early experiences have shaped the direction of Karachi’s housing debate for decades. Governments continue to produce master plans and housing schemes. Yet the city expands primarily through the efforts of its own residents. Where formal housing remains unaffordable or inaccessible, people acquire land informally, build incrementally and create communities with limited or no state assistance.
RETHINKING HOUSING POLICY
By the 1960s, it had become evident that Karachi’s housing problem could not be solved through conventional planning alone. Every new housing scheme addressed only a fraction of the demand, while thousands of new migrants continued to arrive each month.
This forced planners to reconsider a basic assumption. For years, governments had been led to believe by international finance institutions (IFIs) and the United Nations (UN) that complete houses could be built and allocated to low-income families. The experience of Karachi suggested otherwise.
Constructing houses required large financial resources, lengthy administrative procedures and substantial public investment. The state simply lacked the capacity to provide homes, even unfinished ones, or with only basic infrastructure, for everyone who needed them.
Around the same time, a different way of thinking about housing was beginning to emerge internationally. Among its strongest advocates was the British architect and planner John F.C. Turner, whose work in Peru challenged conventional housing policy.
Turner argued that governments should not try to build houses for the poor. Instead, they should provide serviced land, secure tenure and basic infrastructure. Once people had access to land, they were generally capable of building and improving their own homes over time.
Turner’s ideas represented a significant shift in formal urban planning. Housing was no longer viewed simply as a product supplied by the state. It was understood as a process in which families invested gradually, according to their income. Instead of waiting years for a completed house, households could begin with a single room, expand it when finances allowed and improve the structure over several years.
International agencies, including the World Bank and the UN, later incorporated many of these principles into what became known as ‘Sites and Services’ programmes. Sites, meaning land plots, and services, meaning water, sewerage and electricity, were developed and handed over to low-income residents.
In Karachi too, hundreds of units in sites and services schemes were developed, but they did not reach the poor, as they had to be paid for and were unaffordable to the target group, and the administrative process of acquiring them was long, cumbersome and very time-consuming. As such, many of the schemes lay empty for years and were subsequently purchased by middle-income groups. So the informal housing process continued.
The self-built informal housing process also supported the local economy. It created continuous employment for masons, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, transporters, suppliers of construction materials and countless daily-wage labourers. Unlike large government projects, where construction ended once the scheme was completed, self-built neighbourhoods generate economic activity for years. Housing not only provides shelter, it also creates livelihoods.
UPGRADING INSTEAD OF DEMOLISHING
Despite this evidence, official policy continues to regard informal settlements primarily as planning violations. Settlements are described as encroachments on public land rather than as evidence of an unmet demand for affordable housing and commercial development.
Demolition remains a common response. Yet, removing settlements does not remove the need for housing. Families displaced from one location usually settle in an informal settlement elsewhere. This does not reduce the population of informal settlements or of housing units in informal areas.
By the 1970s, informal settlements had become an established part of Karachi’s urban landscape. The city could no longer be understood only through its planned neighbourhoods. Large sections of its workforce lived in older katchi abadis, which are comparatively nearer to work areas.
Government policy gradually began to change in the 1970s. Rather than clearing settlements, planners increasingly considered improving them. This shift was reflected in the Katchi Abadi Improvement and Regularisation Programme, introduced in 1978. The programme accepted that many informal settlements had become permanent communities and that upgrading them was often more practical than demolishing buildings and building new homes. Basic services, such as water supply, sanitation, roads and electricity, could be introduced without forcing residents to relocate.
The policy marked an important departure from earlier approaches. It recognised that low-income communities had already invested substantial resources in building their own neighbourhoods. Upgrading existing settlements was often less expensive and socially less disruptive than clearing them and constructing entirely new housing schemes elsewhere. It also acknowledged that security of tenure encouraged residents to invest further in improving their homes.
THE ORANGI PILOT PROJECT
Perhaps the clearest demonstration of this approach came through the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), established in 1980 under the leadership of Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan. Orangi had developed as one of the largest informal settlements in Asia. Like many katchi abadis, it lacked proper sanitation and basic infrastructure. Conventional planning suggested that only the government possessed the resources to solve such problems and that too through loans from the IFIs.
The OPP challenged that assumption. Instead of waiting for a centrally funded sanitation system, residents organised themselves to finance and construct neighbourhood sewer lines. Technical guidance was provided by the project, while communities contributed labour and resources, including financial ones. Government agencies remained responsible for larger trunk infrastructure, but residents demonstrated that they could successfully manage the sewage-related components within their own neighbourhoods.
The results attracted international attention. The project showed that low-income communities were not passive beneficiaries of development. They possessed knowledge, organisational capacity and a strong willingness to improve their living conditions, when given appropriate technical support and organisational guidance. The success of Orangi influenced urban planning well beyond Pakistan and became a reference point for community-led development across the developing world.
These experiences transformed the housing debate. The central question was no longer whether poor communities could build their own homes. Karachi had already answered that question. The more important question became why official policy continued to treat these communities as temporary or illegal despite decades of evidence that they formed an essential part of the city’s growth.
HOUSING A CITY
Today, it is estimated that around 62 percent of Karachi’s population lives in informal settlements, spread across more than 580 officially recognised katchi abadis and many more unlisted ones. Census reports suggest that there are over 1.7 million houses in formal settlements and a larger number in informal areas. As such, the developers of the informal settlements have performed better than the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) and other government agencies.
As we have seen above, over the past seven decades, Karachi has not simply expanded through government planning. It has been built, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, by the people who could not afford the cost of formal housing or wait for the state to fulfil its promises.
They acquired land through middlemen, borrowed money through community savings, sale of their women’s jahaiz [dowry] jewellery, borrowings and gradually constructed homes. The important role of women in this process has yet to be documented. The city’s history suggests that the real issue has never been whether people can build. It has always been whether planning policies recognise that they already do.
But now, other problems have surfaced, and new debates have been initiated. Under the influence of neoliberal thinking, the state no longer provides housing for the poor. They have to access housing through the market and at an impossible cost. Also, land near the old city katchi abadis is no longer available and the little that is, is unaffordable for low-income households. The only affordable land that is available is on the fringes of the city, and that makes the cost and time of travel even more expensive.
The informal sector developers have found a solution to this problem as well.
Abadis nearer to the city are now being converted into high-rises. An 80 square yard or 120 square yard plot that has a single or double-story house on it is purchased by an informal developer and converted into a four-five or six-seven story building. This is a joint venture between the occupier/owner of the land and the investor.
The investor pays the cost of the land, along with two apartments on the last floor above. Thus, both the investor and the owner are satisfied. The owner of the building rents out the apartments or houses his extended family in them or sells the apartments at market rates, often receiving payments in instalments or through a well-established system of pagrri [goodwill money].
The problem of travelling a long distance to and from work is thus partially overcome. This is the model that is enforced in most of Karachi today. Apartments developed in this fashion are available in old katchi abadis and can cost anything from two million on the ground floor to six hundred thousand on the top floor. But this is also too expensive for the poorer sections of society. As a result, an increasing number of Karachi families sleep on the pavements, under bridges, in parks where possible and in open spaces wherever available.
The Supreme Court of Pakistan has already declared apartments created by converting katchi abadi homes into multi-storey apartments illegal and also ordered their demolition. One building was demolished on the basis of that order. But that is all, for the scale of such demolitions would be so large that no government can carry it out without having to deal with the adverse political ramifications of such a decision.
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