tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8278279504304651957.post1461558125002152638..comments2024-03-26T19:25:43.970-07:00Comments on South Asia Investor Review: Harvard Architect Plans Green City in PakistanRiaz Haqhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8278279504304651957.post-43426742468650796812022-01-20T16:29:20.030-08:002022-01-20T16:29:20.030-08:00Land Grab or River Revival? Inside Pakistan’s $7 B...Land Grab or River Revival? Inside Pakistan’s $7 Billion ‘Green’ City<br />The government wants to spend $7 billion to develop the Ravi riverbank, but opponents say that risks replicating the environmental and societal problems in nearby Lahore.<br /><br />https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-01-19/pakistan-s-plan-to-build-a-green-city-to-save-a-river<br /><br />Warraich is among dozens of landowners petitioning against the government's plan to build a megacity from scratch on the banks of the Ravi river, a once-thriving waterway that’s been depleted by pollution and dwindling water levels. The $7-billion endeavor would span 46 kilometers (29 miles) and include housing, commercial areas, hospitals and schools — creating a metropolis that could ease pressure on overpopulated Lahore and support its urbanization.<br /><br />The Ravi Urban Development Authority, a government body created to manage the project, pitches it as a green initiative that will bring in much-needed resources to clean up the river. “The idea is to manage the area properly,” says RUDA’s Chief Executive Officer Imran Amin.<br /><br />RUDA aims to build a man-made channel and a series of barrages along the Ravi’s path to control its water level, which the authority says will help conserve what limited flow remains and restore Lahore’s supply of groundwater. But some opponents are skeptical of those claims and what they see as a land grab by RUDA. The city’s high court halted the project last year — one ruling in an ongoing legal fight for the future of the river that could reach Pakistan’s Supreme Court.<br /><br />“This is our property. We don’t want to sell it,” says Warraich, sitting on a white plastic armchair outside his farmhouse. “They are acquiring our land for a new city” where local residents won’t be able to continue farming, he says. “I don’t understand this logic.”<br /><br />Pakistan’s leaders have been trying to develop the banks of the Ravi for almost a decade and Prime Minister Imran Khan has made the task a priority.<br /><br />The Ravi river was instrumental to Lahore’s development, but today large pockets sit stagnant while other sections have dried up completely. A water-sharing treaty with India has limited its flow, while Pakistan’s own mismanagement has exacerbated the problem. For decades, the river has collected untreated sewage from Lahore, as well as industrial and agricultural waste.<br /><br />In recent years, Pakistan has developed legislation to regulate water use amid warnings that the country will face water scarcity by 2025. According to a government study last year, only 39 percent of water sources across 29 cities were safe for drinking. Cleaning up the Ravi could help Pakistan forestall an impending water crisis — its basin is home to some 50 million people and the river irrigates about 7 million acres of land.<br /><br />These short-term solutions, however, will run up against the climate clock. Most of Pakistan's rivers are fed by melting snow from glaciers in the Himalayas, which are set to shrink as the world heats up. As global average temperatures rise beyond 2 degrees Celsius — a highly likely scenario based on current trajectories — the volume of Himalayan glaciers will be halved.<br /><br />Global warming is set to increase precipitation across Pakistan, but climate models show the seasonality and intensity of those rains will become less predictable. That's bad news for farmers given the vast majority of crops grown in Pakistan are dependent on reliable monsoon patterns. Though agriculture provides less than 20 percent of the country's gross domestic product, it employs 40 percent of its labor force.<br /><br />Pakistan isn’t the first country to try and solve its environmental issues with more development. Governments have plowed billions of dollars into eco-city initiatives everywhere from Malaysia to Iceland to simultaneously boost economic growth and adapt to a warming planet. The projects are marked by common features including more efficient public transport, green spaces and wastewater treatment plants,” says Amin.<br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8278279504304651957.post-84772291442916773612020-11-11T18:43:13.462-08:002020-11-11T18:43:13.462-08:00Doxiadis in #Pakistan: #Greek #architect and town ...Doxiadis in #Pakistan: #Greek #architect and town planner Constantinos Doxiadis played a significant role in the #urbanplanning & development of the nascent state of Pakistan in the 1960s and master plan for #Karachi & #Islamabad | Online | November 16 http://www.ekathimerini.com/258964 <br /><br />University of the Arts London PhD researcher and British School at Athens resident Syma Tariq will deliver an online lecture on the role of Greek architect and town planner Constantinos Doxiadis in the urban development of the nascent state of Pakistan in the 1960s and master plan for the capital, Islamabad. “Dreaming of Entopia: Constantinos Doxiadis in Pakistan,” starts on Zoom at 7 p.m. Greek time. For details and registration, visit bsa.ac.uk.<br /><br /><br />Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8278279504304651957.post-72874719624299568072020-04-01T17:20:14.954-07:002020-04-01T17:20:14.954-07:00#Pakistan's barefoot architect Yasmeen Lari is...#Pakistan's barefoot architect Yasmeen Lari is developing agile #construction techniques for low cost, zero carbon and zero waste #housing with materials like bamboo, mud and lime and testing her prototype on a shaking table at NED University in #Karachi. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/apr/01/yasmeen-lari-pakistan-architect-first-female-jane-drew?CMP=share_btn_tw<br /><br />A mirrored glass ziggurat stands on a corner in central Karachi, flanked by a pair of polished granite towers. Golden bubble elevators glide up and down behind the tinted windows, shuttling oil executives to their offices through the sparkling five-storey atrium. The Pakistan State Oil House is a power-dressed monument to the petroleum-fuelled excesses of the early 1990s, oozing ostentation from every gilded surface – so it comes as a surprise to learn that its architect is now building mud huts for the poor.<br /><br />“I feel like I am atoning for some of what I did,” says Yasmeen Lari with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was a ‘starchitect’ for 36 years, but then my egotistical journey had to come to an end. It’s not only the right of the elite to have good design.”<br /><br />The 79-year-old architect was awarded the prestigious Jane Drew prize in London in March, a gong that recognises women’s contribution to architecture, for her tireless humanitarian work over the last two decades. She joins an illustrious cast of previous winners, including Zaha Hadid, Denise Scott Brown and Liz Diller, but her career has been like no other, moving from glitzy corporate monuments to shelters built with the barest minimum of means.<br /><br />------------<br />While international aid agencies busied themselves erecting costly prefab housing with concrete and galvanised iron sheets, Lari worked with dispossessed families to rebuild their homes using mud, stone, lime and wood from the surrounding debris. Working with volunteers, she trained local people how to use whatever materials were to hand to rebuild in a better, safer way.<br /><br />“I think we often misunderstand what kind of help is needed,” she says. “As an outsider, you do things that you think are appropriate, but the reality here is different. The aid mindset is to think of everyone as helpless victims who need things done for them, but we have to help people to do things for themselves. There’s so much that can be done with what’s already there, using 10 times less money.”<br /><br />She says that the process of co-creation can also be a crucial part of healing. “Disasters can be truly devastating and people easily fall into deep depression. But if you give them something to do, it really helps with recovery. Something people have helped to make is much more valued than something simply given.”<br /><br />Since 2005, a sequence of further earthquakes, floods and conflicts have kept Lari and her team at the Heritage Foundation on their toes, developing agile techniques with bamboo, mud and lime, always following the principles of low cost, zero carbon and zero waste. Severe flooding in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces in 2010 saw them develop a design for modular community centres raised on stilts, which safely survived more floods a couple of years later.<br /><br />When earthquakes hit Balochistan province in 2013 and Shangla in 2015, Lari designed shelters using a cross-braced bamboo framework, learned from the vernacular dhijji technique. Testing the prototype on a shaking table at NED University in Karachi, they found the structure was capable of withstanding an earthquake more than six times the strength of the 1995 Kobe disaster. If the homes ever did begin to crumble, they could be easily rebuilt using the same organic materials – unlike their concrete and steel counterparts.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8278279504304651957.post-45440623597760071372012-07-06T16:58:19.397-07:002012-07-06T16:58:19.397-07:00Here's a Daily Beast article on Bahria Town ga...Here's a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/02/23/safe-behind-their-walls.html" rel="nofollow">Daily Beast</a> article on Bahria Town gated communities in Pakistan:<br /><br /><i>This unlikely playground for wealthy Muslims is the vision of Khan's boss and father-in-law, Malik Riaz Hussain, a 59-year-old billionaire Pakistani contractor. Set between the capital Islamabad and its sister city Rawalpindi, Bahria Town is the "masterpiece" of his 40-year career, a $6 billion project he has funded solo to avoid having to deal with outside investors. Its nine phases, too vast to fully appreciate without standing on one of the plateaus that overlook them, will one day mesh together into a planned residential city for 1 million people. The project broke ground in 1996, and already, many of the 50,000 luxury properties in the development are owned by wealthy Pakistan expatriates who swooped into Bahria Town after 9/11 to buy second homes amid fears they would be driven out of places like London, New York and Los Angeles. Equally important was the security and serenity that Bahria Town provides, which drew Pakistan expats and a smattering of wealthy Arab Muslims away from places like Dubai.<br /><br />The complex offers amenities (24-hour armed security, schools, hospitals, a fire department, retail shopping, restaurants and entertainment centers) that go above and beyond those in many of the gated communities that have become so popular in countries from the United States to Brazil. Given the nation's security issues, it's especially easy to understand why the rich here want to cloister themselves. Rival Pakistani developers, including one owned by the military, have begun copying Hussain's vision, constructing their own gated communities in the suburbs of major Pakistani cities such as Karachi. Hussain himself is developing a second such site in Lahore, where former prime minister Nawaz Sharif already lives in a gated community called Model Town.<br /><br />Hussain's original inspiration for the mega-community came from the pre-planned town of Reston, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Materials and design inspiration have been imported from everywhere. In the center of roundabouts sit giant Spanish fountains costing $500,000 a pop; the main streets are lined with palm trees brought in from Thailand; grass for the local golf course comes from the U.S. state of Georgia; the education expert for the 1,100-acre university being built is from Seattle. "When I see America, when I see Britain, when I see Turkey, when I see Malaysia," Hussain says, "the only thing I think is, 'Why not Pakistan?' "<br /><br />This is Hussain's key notion—that Bahria Town is a world away from Taliban and Qaeda militants, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and weekly suicide bombings. "This is the real Pakistan," Hussain told NEWSWEEK.</i><br /><br />http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/02/23/safe-behind-their-walls.htmlRiaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.com