The Unmapped City

In 1947, at the Partition of India and Pakistan, Karachi lost half its population and yet doubled in size as refugees/migrants crossed the new border in two directions. The consequence was a city made new overnight, with no urban planning in place to contend with this. Over the decades the city has seen repeated waves of migration, transforming its population which grows increasingly divided along ethnic-political lines. The absence of readily available maps which could allowKarachi's citizens to navigate its way around the fast-changing city symbolises the difficulty of holding the entire city in your mind as a unity - learning how to imagineKarachicontinues to be a challenge for its citizens, including its writers.