Author: Samira Shackle / Source: The Next Web
Over the last five years, something strange has happened at the eastern edge of Karachi, the crowded megalopolis in southern Pakistan. From scratch, a new city has appeared, complete with its own smooth asphalt highways, schools, hospitals, housing options ranging from modest apartment blocks to posh farmhouses — and, of course, an imitation Eiffel Tower.
This is Bahria Town Karachi, an ambitious housing development ultimately planned to cover more than 45,000 acres of land — which is about the same size as Washington, D.C. In Pakistan, its name is synonymous with one man: property developer Malik Riaz, one of the ten richest people in the country and the city’s ultimate proprietor. He’s built similar planned neighborhoods near Islamabad and Lahore.
The site is still under construction, but sections are already inhabited, with hundreds more plots sold before they’ve even been built. The proposition is clear: this is how to buy your way out of urban chaos. Karachi, a city of over 15 million, is frequently the site of conflict, from terror attacks to gang wars, and it also suffers chronic shortages of water, gas, and electricity. Bahria Town promises its own private supply of these basic amenities, so when residents purchase a property here, they are also theoretically paying to avoid power cuts and enjoy regular garbage collections.
Bahria Town is vast in scope, but Malik Riaz is not the only wealthy individual to have ambitions of building his own city. In India, billionaire Ajit Gulabchand started construction of Lavasa in 2010, claiming it would be India’s first newly-built hill station since independence. Situated two hours from the IT hub of Pune and four hours from Mumbai on the western coast, the still-incomplete town is modeled on an Italian fishing village. Like Bahria Town, it markets itself as an ordered and calm alternative to the chaos of India’s rapidly-expanding cities.
Driving around Bahria Town Karachi, I couldn’t shake the sense of being in a parallel universe. It was not just the surreal sculptures — bears, tea cups, flowers — in the middle of the roundabouts, nor the miniature imitation Parthenon. There was something about the identikit apartment blocks and villas, the uniformly-planted palm trees, that was strangely generic. It reminded me of something that Alexandra Schwartz recently wrote in The New Yorker: “That vision of luxury is all about a frictionless sameness: being able to do and eat and buy the same things, in the same kinds of settings, to the tune of the same ambient music, no matter where on the globe one may be.”
She was writing about Hudson Yards, a controversial 28-acre collection of glass towers and high-end retailers on the far western edge of Manhattan. But her words could equally have applied to Bahria Town, which — from the Gulf-style palm trees that line the streets to the ad copy on its website comparing its green spaces to New York City’s Central Park —…
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