State of Pakistani Cities

6

1. All Pakistani cities appear to have no downtowns or city centers—areas of mixed use concentrating residential, office, and commercial entertainment within an almost walkable district.
2. There is an excess demand for most forms of city activities—education, entertainment, office, retail, warehousing, and even poor and middle-class housing. All these activities lack purpose-built space and are forced to be conducted in the only kind of city space that planners have been allowing for the last few years—houses. Housing for the poor, the young starting families, and the middle class is also in short supply since flats are allowed to be built.
3. City management must be viewed as more than providing physical infrastructure and basic services such as sanitation and transport. Social, cultural, and learning activities are an important part of a city. Pakistani cities have no entertainment, community, or leisure space. It is almost as if the planners and city administrators forgot about these. There are no libraries, community centers, theaters, or sporting facilities (except for the élite).
4. Zoning seems to favor large housing, often at the expense of commercial development. Commercialization is arbitrary, cumbersome, and expensive. As a result, zoning and real estate development appear to be a rent-seeking game.
5. Government rather than commerce dominates the city everywhere. There is a large presence of government, especially the army, in all cities. Most prime land is government owned, restricting the availability of prime land for commercial and mixed-use development.
6. Resources for city development remain scarce, not the least because prime city land remains extremely poorly utilized. Quality development, such as hotels, shopping malls, and convention centers, is considered a nuisance. Even when entertainment facilities are built, such as the stadiums in many cities. government officials manage to minimize their use rather than maximize profits and activities. Over time, shops creep up into the walls of the stadium so that eventually it is neither a stadium nor a shopping mall (c Fortress Stadium, Lahore).
7. Since density in city centers is not considered desirable, disorderly suburban development is taking place. Many cities are becoming urban sprawls at the expense of valuable agricultural land.