In , South Asia experienced one of its most severe heat waves in living memory, with 3, recorded deaths across the subcontinent. Rural agricultural workers and low-income urban residents suffered most. The city was ill-prepared to deal with the scale of the crisis.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. Having orchestrated and surfed waves of ethno-political violence throughout the s and s, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement MQM consolidated power over the city government with the election of Mustafa Kamal as mayor in MQM quickly rebranded itself as a modern, secular, neoliberal party to appeal to middle-class voters.
Motivations included aesthetics, alleviating air pollution, and—anticipating future heatwaves—cooling and shade. Horticultural planners advised that a range of exotic and native trees, such as neem, gulmohar, and cypress, would be most suitable. But instead of a mixed ecology, in the government began a monocultural mass planting of Conocarpus erectus , a coastal wetland tree native to the Americas.
It is also fast-growing—up to a foot a year—and cheap to cultivate on a large scale, at three rupees a cutting. Plants play a visible role in the political formations of Karachi, not just at the city-wide level, but also on the level of the landscape.
Over the last few decades, wealthy Karachiites have concentrated in the military cantonments of Defence and Clifton. Owned and administered by the Pakistani military, these securitized spaces offer relative stability and comfort to those who can afford it.
