Violent Gentrification: Moral Economies of Housing and Neoliberal development in the Global South
Muhammad Faraz
This essay examines the forced dislocation and dispossession of working-class citizens through evictions from, and demolitions of ‘unplanned’ and ‘informal’ settlements in Karachi, with Manila, Mumbai, and Sao Paolo as comparatives. I argue that such processes and their aftermath constitute a dominant mode of gentrification, occurring through accumulation by dispossession, in cities of the Global South. In making this argument I hope to shed light on urbanity and (un)belonging as it unfolds in the destruction of the materially embedded social lives of residents of destroyed settlements, stripping them of their political rights as citizens and rendering them into urban refugees, all in the service of ‘development’.
While most forms of gentrification involve varying degrees of coercion, this particular mode is distinct in the explicit use of violence by state and non-state actors as entitlements of citizenship – rights to housing, property, and life – are selectively withdrawn in favour of ‘national’ concerns. This provides an opportunity to ethnographically explore different visions of the city as they are contested by the state and working-class inhabitants. In exploring accounts of such violent gentrification, I aim to undertake four main interventions. Firstly, I want to challenge discourses propagated by the state and largely accepted by the middle and upper classes that residents of targeted settlements are encroaching on state-owned land. Secondly, I wish to impress upon the reader that the entitlements of residents to their land are in fact overruled in favour of the concerns of capital in a transformation of the material ordering of social relations. Thirdly, I will explore the discourses of development and progress – framed in globalised and neoliberal terms and functioning at local, state, and transnational levels - that mask this accumulation by dispossession with a veneer of a public good that should be desired by all residents of the city. Finally, analysing the responses of residents rendered houseless both in terms of resistance and adaptation, I will probe the limits of their agency in contesting narratives of development and their place within it. I draw on my own experience organising against evictions in Karachi in addition to secondary sources
.
Moral economies of housing
Following Alexander et al, I locate the struggle for secure and proper housing as an unfolding moral economy, the site of a contested construction of citizenship by those, in practice, excluded from it. This understanding of citizenship encompasses legalistic notions of a social contract, while also including the moral and affective dimensions attached to a right to housing (2018: 123). Holston shows us how this contestation plays out in Sao Paolo, Brazil, between residents in poor peripheries of the city and state officials who seek their eviction. Residents’ demands for rights of citizenship is insurgent because it is staked on entitlements to the city based on their status as honest workers who built their own houses on plots of land lacking any state infrastructure (Holston, 2009:260). The text-based rights conferred by the constitution are themselves extensions and reifications of these moral claims to entitlement from the state, as neighbourhood associations were heavily involved in its drafting, ensuring the inclusion of innovative models of participatory democracy that enfranchised disadvantaged urban residents (ibid, 2009: 258).
The presence of a moral economy that entailed certain reciprocal rights and obligations – legal security of tenure and property rights in exchange for service rendered to the state (taxes, labour) and city (auto-construction) - was instrumental in enabling an alternative formulation of citizenship to be put forth by residents. A formulation that challenged existing conceptions of citizen as signifying disconnection and deserving of the punitive face of the law, to one that demanded some form of equitable treatment (ibid, 2009: 252). This new conception was realised in demands for state protection and patronage along with using the law as a tool of justice, offering emancipation from corrupt real estate developers who had sold them fraudulent leases and treasury officials acting in contempt of court (ibid, 2009: 251). Flynn’s work on the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) or “Landless workers’ movement”, a squatters’ movement in Brazil, further shows the role of moral and affective performances in articulating one’s place in a moral economy. To be deemed properly deserving of a permanent allocation of property in a settlement, MST members had to become properly ‘landless’, enacting a range of symbolic and material performances and gestures that involved productive use of squatted encampment land, an aesthetic of orderliness, and commitment to MST political principles (Flynn, 2018).
Forced Evictions by demolitions in karachi
Figure 1: (Azam, 2021) Residents gather in protest as demolitions start around Gujjar Nullah.
Drawing on this literature, I characterise residents of Katchi Abadis (informal settlements) in Karachi and elsewhere as staking similar claims to rights of citizenship in the moral economy of housing. These claims are made simultaneously in multiple registers; local, state, and transnational. On the local level, residents emphasise their belonging to the city through aspects such as length of tenure, construction and improvement of housing, and payment for utilities. The state does not escape responsibility either, as its abandonment of generations of migrant workers’ housing needs amounted to a tacit authorisation of communities to provide for themselves through informal housing. This context plays a large part in the tolerance and indeed regularisation of these settlements by the Pakistani state, as legislated in the Sindh Katchi Abadi’s Act (SKAA) of 1987, for example (Hasan, 2015b).
Regularisation was followed by the granting of leases from various municipal authorities, reflecting the fragmented nature of the contemporary state, where a single Karachi neighbourhood might have houses leased from three different municipal departments mixed in with houses with more precarious forms of tenure based on purchase agreements documented on notarised stamp paper (KBT, 2021). This situation has resulted from the complex moral economies at play, from patron-client relationships with municipal bureaucrats to a resurgent democratic government at the national level eager to repudiate the military administration it succeeded and position itself as a populist ally.
Transnational discourses on housing as a human right, propagated by global institutions such as the UN, have also played a key role in urging states to respect residential rights irrespective of legal tenure (Randeria & Grunder, 2009). The increasing uptake of such discourses by residents in their formulation of alternative citizenships of the state exhibit the deeply imbricated nature of local, state, and transnational registers; rejecting a rigid separation or opposition between them as they come together to constitute an embedded moral economy of housing in which urban residents assert their right to security in housing they have built and occupied for decades.
flooding, climate change resilience, and development
Figure 2a: (NED, 2020) Section of aerial survey conducted to identify “encroachments” to be demolished along Gujjar Nullah.
Figure 2b: (NED, 2020) Table laying out House I.D. numbers of structures identified through the survey and percentage to be demolished
Beginning around February 2021, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) started demolishing houses on both sides of the Gujjar Nullah (storm drain) running through central Karachi (see figure 1). This was preceded by a process of tagging structures to be demolished with spray-painted ID numbers and a percentage value of the structure to be cut (see figure 3). These decisions were undertaken on the basis of a survey that highlighted a fifty feet strip of land to be cleared on both sides of the drain using aerial footage (Khan, 2021) (See figures 2a and 2b). By commissioning students and staff from a local university to conduct the survey, one roundly criticised by established urban planners, the state was able to resignify legally tenured residential and commercial properties as illegal encroachments to be reclaimed for its developmental projects (Hasan; 2020, 2021). The exclusion of any data collection on the ground, whether deliberate or inadvertent, was crucial in executing this resignification, as it ensured no troublesome facts were uncovered that would hamper the state’s designs.
The large proportion of leased houses amongst structures marked for demolition, the exact number of households affected, the particular nature of damage inflicted on individual structures, and the share of women, minorities, and disabled residents disproportionately harmed could all be conveniently ignored by restricting the survey methodology to satellite and drone imagery. The violence of this top-down ocular perspective in stripping human settlements of their particularity and social embeddedness in the lives of its residents was complemented by arbitrary and callous bureaucrats, who refused to challenge the official narrative produced by the survey when confronted by contrary evidence. Instead, they responded to any pleas for leniency in the percentage of structure to be cut by doing the opposite and increasing the percentage; subverting the norms of client-patron relationships by penalising those who dared question their authority (KBT, 2021). This marked a major rupture in the state’s position in the moral economy of housing in the settlement, changing roles from regularising the settlement and connecting it with utilities as a paternalistic authority acknowledging its own shortfalls to the developmental state as violent expropriator (Comaroff & Comaroff; 2006: 15).
Figure 3: (Faraz, 2021) House I.D. number and percentage painted on the side of a building by Karachi Metropolitan Corporation officials.
Figure 4: (Faraz, 2021) Construction bulldozer to be used in the demolitions parked near the Nullah in the morning. The claw is used to break down houses that residents refused to demolish themselves, often burying household goods in the rubble.
In Karachi, the evictions occurring around storm drains discussed at the start of this section are located at a conjuncture of multiple developmental discourses, intended to foster climate resilience in the city’s drainage infrastructure, develop its solid waste disposal systems, and improve road connectivity and traffic flow in central Karachi. It is a project involving not only municipal and provincial governments, but federal ministries, the judiciary, and the World Bank. While there is disagreement between these actors over the scope of the project, as I will later discuss, it is impossible to fully extricate any single actor from the project as a whole, given the interconnectedness of their particular goals and interventions. The principal rationale for the project stems from increasingly destructive flooding in Karachi during the monsoon season, as climate change induces ever more extreme weather patterns. While the project has its origins in June 2020, before that year’s monsoon season, the once in a century intensity of rainfall that year and the extensive destruction and damage it caused through flooding that lasted weeks played a major role in elevating its urgency (Haque, 2020). In a classic case of climate injustice, people who suffered the most from the flooding by virtue of living right next to a storm drain that overflowed its banks by over seven feet of water at the height of the flooding are scapegoated, being made to suffer even more intense environmental vulnerability by being rendered houseless in the midst of a resurgently deadly pandemic in order to prevent the embarrassing sight of upscale cantonment neighbourhoods being flooded for weeks due to their own inadequate drainage infrastructure (Khan, 2020).
purity and waste: the aesthetic violence of ‘cleaning up’
As Schwenkel has astutely observed, waste and its disposal becomes a central object of political contestation in urban governance, as well as signifying order and purity in society a la Mary Douglas (Schwenkel, 2020). In the case of Gujjar Nullah, a central problem identified by the provincial government as well as the World bank was its greatly reduced carrying capacity as a result of clogging with solid waste. This is further worsened by the use of Karachi’s storm drains to carry the city’s (untreated) sewerage, for want of a dedicated central sewerage system. Consequently, in collaboration with the Government of Sindh (GoS), the World Bank initiated Project SWEEP (Solid Waste Emergency and Efficiency Project), of which the initial component involved emergency cleaning of storm drains in Karachi prior to the 2020 monsoon season as well as education of residents of informal settlements adjacent to them about proper waste disposal techniques, measures for which it would reimburse the GoS (Rasheed, 2020). Absent from this intervention is any attempt to probe why the storm drains have become so clogged in the first place. Instead, the provisions for education seem to blame residents for a lack of awareness around consequences of dumping into the drain, ignoring the lack of waste disposal infrastructure in the area and waste from industrial and construction activities, a problem that the demolitions have worsened right before the 2021 monsoon season (See figure 7).
Figure 5: (Faraz, 2021) Nullah almost completely blocked by solid waste and rubble from the demolitions.
Furthermore, the activities of KMC have extended the World Bank’s objective of clearing solid waste from the drain to clearing settlements alongside it, seemingly extending the label of waste to these built structures as well. This fits in with a perception of informal settlements in bourgeois society as disorderly eyesores contaminating the city, representing its inhabitants’ irredeemable rural character and unsuitability for the city. While the World Bank vehemently contests the idea that its project was ever intended for the clearing of informal settlements (World Bank, 2021), questions remain as to its awareness of the likelihood of such operations taking place given the history of its implementing agencies, especially since 2017 (Hasan, 2018); the potential for such operations to be covered under subsequent components of the project that allow for general infrastructural enhancements; and the repeated invocations of Project SWEEP to provide political cover for demolition activities, although this has since been discontinued (KBT, 2021).
Moving from the way in which projects to increase Karachi’s climate resilience were in fact imbricated with violent dispossession, I examine the ways in which discourses of development were embedded in these projects, ultimately servicing the needs of capital. Perhaps the clearest evidence that there is more than meets the eye is the plan for 30ft wide roads on to be built on both sides of the drain, a project that necessitated most of the demolitions in the first place. While there have been a variety of official rationales offered for the construction of these roads, from their necessity in allowing heavy machinery access to the drain for cleaning and hauling away waste to providing a bulwark against resettling. However, given the infrastructural needs of the existing community, the only plausible reason for building such wide roads is to enable a process of gentrification. Once road connectivity is established with the Lyari expressway and the storm drains are cleaned and beautified as per state plans, the remaining informal settlement will be similarly seized and cleared away to make room for developers to construct upscale housing and commercial centres in central Karachi (Azam, 2020). Such speculation is not without merit, as the experience of the urban poor in Global South metropoles including Karachi can attest.
Elinoff shows how concrete in Thailand symbolises the corruption of its government, as large construction projects provide the perfect opportunity to circulate public funds amongst favoured networks, as well as leaving behind material legacies for politicians who initiate such projects (Elinoff, 2017). A similar regime of concrete based development reigns in Pakistan, with what is happening around Gujjar Nullah simply being the latest iteration of the same logic, as the experience of Manila’s dispossessed testifies. Choi illustrates how land-based development projects, in this case a railway line, led to mass evictions of 35,000 households which were relocated to 11 sites mostly outside metro manila (Choi, 2016:585). Many of these households ended up moving back to the site of their former settlements as they were unable to extract a living in areas with poor infrastructural links to the city with which their livelihoods were intertwined. This had the dual effect of transferring the housing they had been relocated into to more affluent households while leaving them in a much more precarious situation vis-à-vis threats of eviction and permanence of housing in the neighbourhoods they once lived in (ibid, 2016:587). Taking such projects together in their goal of transforming Manila into a globally competitive city, one can see the accumulation by dispossession at work where promises of relocation and development are instead abandoned and turned over to the private sector for profit-making activities through public-private partnerships (Ortega, 2016).
resistance and (forced) resilience
Randeria and Grunder (2011) document the increasing juridifcation of responses by slum residents in Mumbai to their dispossession, an outcome echoed by Holston in Sao Paolo and certainly applicable to residents of Gujjar Nullah’s targeted settlements as well (Holston, 2009). Given the continuously decreasing space for political dissent in a Pakistani state overrun with counterterrorist security regimes (Rizvi, 2018), the bulk of the resistance to their dispossession by the state has focussed on legal and quasi-legal; including the provincial high court, the supreme court upon whose notice the storm drain clearance was prioritised, the World Bank grievance redressal mechanism, and various national and international human rights and housing rights organisations. While such legal challenges have been incredibly useful; stay orders obtained from the Anti-Encroachment tribunal have protected leased houses from demolition, and their violation by the KMC led to an injunction against the entire project (Baloch, 2021) (See figure 4), they have delimited the scope for political mobilisation, which is mostly organised around pressuring relevant legal bodies to adjudicate in favour of the dispossessed.
Figure 6: (Faraz, 2021) Building bearing graffiti reading ‘This house is leased. World Bank explain yourself’ in Urdu (In black to the right of the door). Also visible are stay orders obtained from the Anti-Encroachment tribunal taped onto the wall to the left of the door.
Figure 7: (Faraz, 2021) Constitutive meeting of the Gujjar Nullah Mutassireen (Affectees) Committee.
Activists, prominent lawyers, and a Leftist political party have come together with affected residents as the Karachi Bachao Tehreek (Save Karachi Movement) to form a nexus that mediates residents’ demands in these varied forums, reflecting Rizvi’s study of similar alliances in sharecroppers’ struggle for land rights against the Pakistani military that allowed the amplification of their political power while simultaneously cultivating hierarchy and divisions in the movement (Rizvi, 2019).
Importantly, dispossessed residents’ mobilisation towards alternative assertions of citizenship is not a given, but rather a carefully cultivated and contingent condition, resting on moral and affective performances including sit-ins, marches, court proceedings, and social media solidarity that reaffirm the injustice of the dispossession and reject residents’ lives as disposable. However, the moral economy of housing residents are accustomed to has normalised for them their perception as bare life, in Agamben’s words (Agamben, 1998), in the eyes of the state. Left to house themselves and subject to constant exploitation in the city, residents are not especially hopeful about the prospect of acquiring rights on par with those enjoyed by the rich. It is no wonder then, that many residents have been hesitant to further invite the wrath of the state by standing up to it; and have accepted the meagre compensation offered of PKR 15,000 per month for two years, to be paid biannually (lower than the rent most displaced households must now pay) if they were lucky enough to have the opportunity (KBT, 2021). Even worse, many have resorted to breaking their own houses in advance of the KMC, in order to salvage the iron inside their concrete houses before it all gets turned to rubble (see figure 8). Such a state of affairs calls for more attention to be paid to the forced resilience of this extremely vulnerable yet equally essential class of citizens that inhabit metropoles not only across the Global South, but in the Global North as well.
Figure 8: (Faraz, 2021) Nullah choked with solid waste and rubble from demolitions while three people can be seen demolishing a building to salvage structural iron in the background.
Figure 9: (Faraz, 2021) Partially demolished house exposing the interior of a three storey house, including a beautifully tiled and fitted bathroom in the top-right.
By focussing on an explicitly violent means of dispossessing the urban poor in Karachi, I have sought to demonstrate the functioning of neoliberal capitalist logics at work in development. This is so even when the goal of such development is ostensibly for public goods like infrastructure or increasing climate resilience. Such a pattern can be seen cropping up across cities of the Global South, where a paternalist rhetoric of the greater good is used by the state to mask upward redistribution of resources in the form of appreciating real estate values while those dispossessed are shunted off into ‘rehabilitative’ yet unliveable settlements, or simply ignored and silenced. The entitlements to the city, and land more broadly, of residents who have staked insurgent claims to citizenship through affective performances and material investment is thus rendered invalid. Instead, respecting the entitlement of residents who have been integral to urban growth and prosperity is absolutely crucial if we desire to live in more just and humane cities.
references
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figures:
Figure 1: Azam, O. 2021. Demolitions start around Gujjar Nullah[MCC1] . [photograph]. The News International. https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/790505-gujjar-nullah-the-markings-of-doom-and-gloom[MCC2] Accessed: 07/01/22
Figure 2a: NED 2020. Section 5 of Gujjar Nullah demolition survey. [map] NED UET. https://karachibachaotehreek.org/docs/demolitions-map.pdf Accessed: 07/01/22
Figure 2b: NED 2020. Table for section 5 of Gujjar Nullah demolition survey. [table] NED UET. https://karachibachaotehreek.org/docs/demolitions-map.pdf Accessed: 07/01/22
Figure 3 Faraz, M. 2021. KMC House ID and demolition percentage. [Photograph]. (Faraz’ own private collection.)
Figure 4: Faraz, M. 2021. Construction bulldozer at the Nullah. [Photograph]. (Faraz’ own private collection.)
Figure 5: Faraz, M. 2021. Nullah blocked by rubble and trash. [Photograph]. (Faraz’ own private collection.)
Figure 6: Faraz, M. 2021. Buildings with Anti-World Bank graffiti and taped tribunal stay orders. [Photograph]. (Faraz’ own private collection.)
Figure 7: Faraz, M. 2021. Meeting to form the Gujjar Nullah Mutassireen Committee. [Photograph]. (Faraz’ own private collection.)
Figure 8: Faraz, M. 2021. Demolishing own house to salvage iron. [Photograph]. (Faraz’ own private collection.)
Figure 9: Faraz, M. 2021. Building sliced open. [Photograph]. (Faraz’ own private collection.