2022 has mostly been chaos & turmoil in Pakistan, but on at least one count, it was the best year for Karachi since 1969: public transport! 🚌 The city’s transit map started lighting up, with the opening of the first Bus Rapid Transit Line, the Green Line, in January 🍾 For many months, it was the lonely line in a transit desert.

At the #FIFAWorldCup2022, the real winner is Doha.

I was expecting a flashy city (which there is) but not the investments in art, architecture, culture, education & public transport that I experienced. Here’s a few things you should see if you visit 🧶: 1) Museum of Islamic Art. The I. M. Pei-designed building itself is an icon, with its high vaulted atrium and stunning views of Doha from its courtyard. The surrounding park is sprinkled with public art & pavilions with more exhibits. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Strolled through the mile long Clifton Necklace with a friend today. It’s a mile-long strip of six interconnected parks, from Nehr-e-Khayyam to Bagh Ibn-e-Qasim. Saw a grand total of maybe 15 people in all parks combined. Here is what you’re all missing out on: 1: the Urban Forest. It’s in better shape than ever, & decked with a natural play area for children. Still a work in progress, but stumbling upon the lavender patch in the last photo was such a joyful experience! The fragrance was incredible. Zero visitors enjoying all this.

There’s a place in #Karachi where you can almost forget you’re in the city. With thick vegetation…

“These stations are like cathedrals. These trains are the longest we’ve seen in London,” says @SadiqKhan, the @MayorofLondon. “I challenge anyone who uses the Elizabeth line … not to have their breath taken away – it’s just mind-blowing.” I took the bait & wasn’t disappointed. First, the soaring ceiling as you descend into the station. It’s mostly concrete, but it doesn’t feel cold. The warm ambient lighting, with no obvious sources, and the folding and curving of hard surfaces means you’re subconsciously nudged to move along.

Pakistan has a quality problem. Quality of life & quality of goods. If quality of life were better, all your highly qualified workforce wouldn’t immigrate. They could provide services you could export. We only produce low quality service for local consumption. Our blue collar workers work low wage jobs & send remittances home. White collar workers mostly invest in their new home countries. Hence, low remittances. Same with goods. Low value goods exported. Mediocre quality goods consumed internally. Hence, low exports.

@rezabaqir’s master stroke was pushing fossilized banks towards digital services. It was March 2020, & I remember standing against a window on the 13th floor of UBL tower. There were ~15 of us huddled in that room. On the street below, not a soul except an occasional police van.

https://twitter.com/rezabaqir/status/1521566438170968064

We’d been asked to allow for account opening for overseas Pakistani, digitally & instantly, without their presence. It seemed impossible, since over the last year, banks had conducted an extensive exercise on getting their millions of customers biometrically verified. In person.

Seems like a lot of people have basic questions on Raast. Since it is a @StateBank_Pak driven initiative, I think they need to drive customer awareness (through participating banks) too. Here, I can answer some of the most common questions I’ve come across:

https://twitter.com/ZubairKhanPK/status/1491388856536801280

1. What really is Raast?

A simpler way to send & receive money. You will not need to ask for, or share, bank a/c details. Once you link your mobile # with your bank a/c, you can ask people to send you money via Raast, to your mobile #. Money will deposit into yr linked bank a/c.

#Karachi has a glorious bus-based mass transit line, 23 years after the Karachi Circular Railway shut down, and I couldn’t be happier. This is the Board Office station. A bunch of city enthusiasts went up & down the entire line to celebrate! We got on at the cavernous Numaish station. The sight of a ticket booth was pure joy. I could hardly contain my joy!

To write about 1950s Karachi, I cycled along the route of MTC tramway. Bandar Road was the main spine & rightfully so. How would the domes & spires of grand public buildings, like Municipal Hall, not instill a sense of civic pride? From Eidgah, you can see as far as the port. The colonial, mercantilist Karachi lives on at Napier Rd, around the bend at Nigar Cinema, & up the length of Lawrence/Nishtar Rd. Trading houses. Steel warehouses. Timber Market. Bhimpura. Ramswamy. This line went all the way up to Gandhi Garden.

Here is Karachi’s “model” thoroughfare, Shahrah-e-Faisal (SEF). 15 kms from Metropole to the Airport, it falls under 2 Cantonments & 2 Districts. Before 2004, it had 3 bridges. Now it has 12. That hasn’t changed its capacity & it continues to be a nightmare. Here’s why. Nine flyovers & underpasses, costing billions, have been added over the last two decades to make this “signal-free,” & a thoroughfare for cars to speed through. Significant chunks were widened. What the planners ignored was that most parts of SEF are destinations.

Clifton’s Emerald Necklace.

Clifton, & District South, have the largest concentration of designated parks in the city. From Nehr-e-Khayyam to the beach & back up along the Boat Basin, they form a chain, which, if connected, can provide the city a valuable recreation space. Nehr-e-Khayyam is right now a dumpster & dumping ground. Several attempts have been made to encroach along its banks. Few attempts made to restore the drain & develop it as a linear park. Say hello to these excited neighborhood pups.

Went on the Orange Line Metro, Pakistan’s first rail-based mass transit system, accompanied by @theLahorewala. What a beautiful piece of public infrastructure! Don’t want to dismiss the displacement it caused, but here’s some of the highlights: Happy to report it has the new train shine & smell✨ 🌺. Commuters were almost all working class folks, quiet, reverent & respectful of this public property. It’s only been a few months, but the silence & non-chalance of the riders shows how quickly good transit can embed itself.

Lahore’s greatest assets are its sprawling public parks: esp Race Course/Jilani & Lawrence Gardens/Bagh-e-Jinnah. @asim_minahil suggested we walk through them, and up the Mall to Lahore Museum, as we caught up on our lives. Here’s them in all their glory, with no/few people. Special mentions at Race Course: a thriving cactus display 🌵; a tree planted by filmstar/glookaara Megha Ji 💃🏽; a garden of yellow and Orange Marigolds 🌼; and curated, thick grooves of trees that look like an enchanted forest in this fog/smog 🌳🌴🌲

Atlas of (Dys)Function: Power (& lack thereof) in Karachi & the region.

Here is the 1st chapter of my proposed atlas that I’ve completed over the last 10, wrist-breaking days. I’d taken time off from work to focus on this labour of love, & produce at least 1 complete artifact. On the front is a map, geographically accurate, & slightly exaggerated, laying out all power production facilities (> 50 MWs) in & around the city. I added the missing ones from the last iterations, cleaned up the icons & standardised the colours for clarity.

Here’s my New Year’s present for fellow Karachiites: Charaagh Talaay Andhera, a map of power produced in & around Karachi. By the end of 2021, there will be more than 1GW of electricity produced in the region, almost the same as Dubai. Khi needs around 3,500 MWs. The bulk of this new capacity will come from new coal and RLNG based power plants that have already come online, or are on the way. They’re clustered on the west, around Hub, or on the east, around Port Qasim.

Here is the promised fictitious map of a public tram network 🚃 in the south of #Karachi, with connections to #KCR 🚊 and the Green and Yellow BRTs 🚌. I didn’t dream it up. I read through hundreds of pages of JICA reports, so you don’t have to. Here’s what I learnt ... There are some Japanese folks who know Gurumandir, Daakkhana, Lalookhait & Surjani way better than most of us. They spent years conducting surveys, detailed drawings, maps and studies, all compiled into 2 key outputs: KTIP Masterplan (2013) & KCR Preperatory Survey (2013)

You’ve probably recently seen a lot of people cycling around on the streets 🛣, or on Instagram 📸. You’ve also seen the obnoxious types who have a Vigo trailing behind them as they cycle 🚴🏽🚗. Is this a fad that will disappear? Or is this here to stay in Pakistan? Luckily for us, most of these outdoor enthusiasts log/record their activities using mobile apps. One of those apps, @Strava, converts last 2 years of data into heat maps, and shares publicly. I dug into the maps for #Karachi to see what it says about this cycling & running trend.

Newly annointed Dr. @erumrum shared with me a paper on Santiago, Chile's public transport redesign in early 2000s, titled @Transantiago: A tale of two cities. Riveting read & raises really interesting questions about Karachi's transport experience. Thought I'd share here: 1. Santiago went through a deregulation of public transport in 1980s, leading to "atomised ownership structure" and fall in service quality through the 90s. Same in Karachi. Many owners, own 1-2 buses, & form a powerful political collective (Khi Transport Ittehad). Bad quality.

Panic during pandemic:

TL/DR: fridge goes bust hours before lockdown on Sunday. Will it get fixed in time for a 2-week curfew?

Refrigerator stops cooling sometime in the afternoon. Mum plays around with thermostat. Doesn’t inform anyone... I notice milk carton is warm when making tea for fam around 7pm. Think it must be a new one that’s why it’s warm. Water bottles also barely cold. Ignore my sixth sense.

🌿 So I’ve spent two days digging through various budgets to get a simple answer: how much do our major cities (Khi, Lhr & Isl) spend on their parks. I did not get any definitive answer to that, 🙄, but here are some fun things I learnt instead: 1) KMC is the ONLY local govt that actually shared a detailed budget, albeit in Urdu, rendering it unsearchable. They spent about PKR 1 billion on parks, but this excludes a number of large parks, like Safari Park, Zoo etc. But this is only a fraction of parks in Karachi...