Cities are important. On the one hand, they provide their inhabitants with the necessities that make them livable, and on the other hand, like a mother, they offer a sense of belonging.
A city, then, is not merely a topography of the arrangement of physical land surface; it is a very much breathing entity, providing a habitat that can be called home – both for the people who were born here and for the ones who come from a different soil, but planted the seeds of their future in the alien landscape. This is what an ideal city should do. But does this apply to Peshawar? Let’s discuss.
T S Eliot, the modern poet and critic, in his magnum opus, published in 1922, ‘The Waste Land’, called London an “unreal city” because of the ugliness and squalor of the common urban scene and the prevailing fragmentation of societal meaning; he was, in a way, criticising the essence –livability – of London by showcasing the deficiency of fertility of the public spaces that could make the lives of citizens more radiant and creative.
One might wonder, after so many years of the poem and the so-called technological upheavals of modernity, why it is that one of the oldest cities of South Asia and capital of the historically, culturally, and civilisationally rich Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is still a mess; It feels like we are also living in an unreal city, governed squarely by pathetic governance, and so, it is high time to underscore the ills in the public discourse, much like what we see about the other metropolises.
Peshawar, the city of flowers, is, de facto, failing to provide the fundamentals of an urban, livable and living city: it lacks reliable infrastructure and efficient mobility to improve accessibility, productivity, and overall quality of life. A single drop of rain can cause hours and hours of power cuts in a distribution network already fond of revenue-based loadshedding. Recently, much of the city was excavated to replace gas pipelines, without any plan to clear the debris or restore the streets. Roads are in bad shape – unplanned bumps, copious cracks and potholes, and piles of garbage except in posh areas and gated societies.
The failed governance is also evident by the open drains, a spectacle one comes across daily and can cost many innocent lives. Digital connectivity is dysfunctional; if one travels on the stretch of GT Road from the start of the city to the end, the internet only works fragmentarily. And the public relies on overcrowded Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) without any secondary structure to ensure accessibility for all. Recreational places, like public libraries and parks, are non-existent. Public spaces, which should reflect the diverse identities of those who live in them, remain male-centric. Once, while trying to gauge the skewness, I consciously counted women at Shoba Bazaar at the beginning of the evening. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a single one during the 30-minute walk.
At the same time, municipal services and local administration are fragmented and incoherent. In some areas, local government functions are being performed by the Peshawar Development Authority (PDA), in others by Water & Sanitation Services Peshawar (WSSP), and in the remaining areas by Tehsil Municipal Authorities (TMAs). This is notwithstanding the no man’s land, where mere entry is a quandary in itself, operating in this kaleidoscope autonomously as a separate administrative body with a lot of overlap.
There seems to be no sustainable long-term effective urban planning; the city is expanding horizontally almost incessantly and ruthlessly at the peripheries. This unplanned sprawl, from 4,365 hectares (1981) to 17,330 hectares (2019), in the presence of delayed decision-making, poor coordination and ineffective implementation of development plans, has jeopardised agricultural productivity and urban livability. Every day we see a novel, shady society offering plot files, sans guaranteed possession and rigorous oversight.
Additionally, the city doesn’t enable residents to earn a decent living and afford essential goods and services. Industrialisation is almost imaginary. The major business is trading and services. And prima facie, nobody is interested in undoing this situation; neither is the government paying heed to resolve regulatory sludge and political economy, nor are the businessmen interested in manufacturing anything. Rather, the elites of this city are lazy; they are fond of investing in unproductive capital, like speculative real estate. The result is declining employment opportunities, low income levels, a high cost of living, unaffordable housing, and a lack of economic resilience at the society level.
Access to quality public services that support human development, well-being, and long-term prosperity is missing. As the capital, apart from the Afghan influx, we see a flood of people from all over KP every now and then for better healthcare, education, emergency services and social protection. It puts a lot of pressure on the funds already strained by fiscal austerity and the political gamut, where each CM – who surprisingly never belongs to Peshawar – tries to spend more and more on their constituency; ergo, the citizens of this city have to squander from their own pockets for the quality basic needs that should have been provided pro bono.
Plus, we see environmental degradation day by day. This means harmful air and water quality, deforestation of urban greenery, poor waste management, and harebrained climate adaptation and disaster preparedness. As per a policy analysis, Peshawar residents lose 5.8 years of life expectancy due to poor air quality; moreover, according to Unicef, nearly 400,000 people in Peshawar are deprived of basic toilet facilities, and only 20 per cent of the water sources are safe for drinking. This sorrowful and inhumane situation exhibits the urgent need to invest, in terms of money as well as attention, immediately.
All of the above are further exacerbated by the rise of terrorism, where public safety, rule of law, civic participation and social equity are axed. This has led to citizens, interminably, living under the menace of constant fear of obliteration due to a suicide bomb while strolling in public spaces. Although the situation has ameliorated vis-a-vis the days when a suicide bomb in two or three days was a norm, the hydra of terrorism is returning and morphing into a more horrendous force that could take more years to be repaired again.
How exactly can the situation be dealt with? I think those in the corridors of power, with advisors and urban planners studied in top-notch global universities, know already; it is time that we own the city and ask, like in any other functional democracy, for the bare minimum and make them accountable for what we are entitled to: good education, clean water, resilient health system, tidy environment, economy and infrastructural improvement, an enabling milieu for cultural capital and community engagement, and a city that is real, capable of providing the motherly belonging and adequate livability simultaneously.
The writer is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector. He can be reached at:[email protected]
