Adaptive Reuse in Karachi: History, Documentation, and Intervention

Graduate / Professional

This seminar considers the challenges of adaptive reuse in a global mega-city and explores and enact the potential of cultural preservation to resist mechanisms of erasure that stem from capital-driven development. Karachi is considered as an interdisciplinary case study and working site, bringing together graduate students from history of art, architecture, and related disciplines. This multidisciplinary collective of students and faculty with diverse backgrounds and skills in research, documentation, analysis, and design works as a team to both learn from, and contribute to, ongoing work that is being led by The Heritage Foundation of Pakistan (HFP). The HFP, established by Sohail and Yasmeen Lari in 1980, has been documenting the British Colonial era buildings of Karachi and Lahore for several years. At present, Yasmeen Lari has designed a pedestrian pathway through Kharadar, with the help of local shop-owners, on the principals of community engagement and participatory design. Countering urban decay and climate change, the aim of this seminar is to consider how future architects, urbanists and historians may approach the issues facing the region. From this vantage point, we consider the manners in which urban space is instrumentalized towards narratives of imperial and national identity; how gentrification and ex-urbanization effects historical city-centers; how revitalization projects must be understood ad critiqued; and what role collaborative and interdisciplinary study may play as a conduit and conveyer of positive solutions. Starting with a comparativist approach, the seminar digs deep into the histories and cultures of Sindh, Pakistan, foregrounding how culture is made manifest through buildings and cities. We then move to contemporary Karachi and how these histories confront the dynamics of a city of over twenty million inhabitants per the 2023 census. Finally, the group takes an in-depth look at Kharadar, its urban form and the forces that are shaping the context that HFP is working with and responding to. These three inputs inform a mid-semester report integrating text and drawings collectively compiled by the student group in preparation for on-site fieldwork in Karachi. In Karachi, we collaborate with the HFP, using the Kharadar pedestrian pathway project as both site and substrate to directly participate in an ongoing cultural preservation project. This fieldwork includes collection of contextual documentation (architectural, oral, and historical); engagement with community stakeholders, policymakers, and urban designers; and collaboration with the shop-owners, craftspeople, and designers creating the pathway. Finally, we work with HFP to outline envisioning a project that the students will undertake over the second half of the semester that contributes to the Kharadar pedestrian pathway, while also identifying strategies for its expansion in the old city. On return to New Haven, the student group synthesizes material from the fieldwork, articulates the scope of the project, and again works collectively to craft a design proposal, in text, drawings, and models, that is theoretically and materially responsive to the context of the old city and the contemporary forces that it is negotiating. The results are presented to a group of academics, architects, preservationists, and Mrs. Lari herself, whose travel to Yale is supported by the School of Architecture as part of a presentation and celebration of her career and work. Prerequisite: permission of instructors. T 1:30pm-3:25pm