A young woman in Karachi rides a motorbike to her university challenging norms of access to public spaces for women in the city. The picture is by Mariam Usman and is being used with her permission.
Spaces for Women: Shattering Utopias
Marium Asif*
When I think of spaces in Karachi, places where I can go alone or with my female friends, I think of being enclosed within four walls. Spaces and places are the same here. They consist of the same four walls, with the limited activity Karachi offers. The only aspect that changes is their interior design. Because spaces for women in Karachi are confined to four walls, a sample book on aesthetics, yet claustrophobic.
The term ‘walkable cities’ is the utopia I envisioned growing up, but it’s a bit of a buzz-word now. It’s an easy win in any argument when a relative asks me why I want to go abroad, what’s so special about Chicago. “Why don’t you stay in Karachi with your family?” ask my relative aunties. “Walkable cities, Aunty.” I reply with a smile, nod and walk away knowing there’s no response they could possibly give to this.
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In Phadke’s book “Why Loiter” (2011), she talks about how it’s not only unfriendly people that make a place unsafe, but also unfriendly spaces. Design choices that make public spaces obscure and private feed into the notion that the public street is dangerous, and solidifies the gendered distinction that public spaces are to be occupied by men, and the ghar (house) is the only safe spot for women.
While conducting a research study conducted with a colleague in 2020 that involved online surveys with hundreds of women, a rough list of factors affecting the safety of a place for women emerged. The prominent ones included lighting, openness, visibility, security, walk-path, public transport and gender disparity. All these factors are essential when designing a space; after all, who doesn’t think of them when designing a space for public use? However, these metrics are rarely applied within the context of public spaces in Pakistan.
The crux is that the elimination of female comfort when designing public spaces is not taken into account reflecting a deliberate disregard in order to maintain a patriarchal equilibrium, to keep women out of public spaces not meant to be theirs.
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I’ve spent the last five months walking on the streets of
Chicago. The Institute I attend is in the middle of the metropolitan overlooking Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago. My lovely, small apartment that I share with my friend is almost a 40 minute commute from there. Twenty minutes of that commute is a walk, and the rest is by the train.
The idea of walkability is so novel to everyone I know in Karachi that my stories of the Chicago Transport System will be met with awe. No one in Chicago bats an eyelid when I say that in my circle of fifteen in the city, nobody owns a car despite being in their mid-twenties. This is so because for Chicagoans, cars are not a necessity since for the most part the city is walkable, filled with at least 11 different train tracks and thousands of buses. You can get from the suburbs to downtown without needing a car. You can walk to the grocery store without fearing for your life. You can cross the road and have cars stop for you without fearing someone driving over you. All of which is utopian for someone from Karachi.
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I am back in Karachi for my winter break. Somehow after spending a few months in Chicago, my automatic response of walkable cities to aunties does not roll off my tongue so easily now. It’s because I realize that I would not be caught dead using the underground subway after 10pm in Chicago, I recheck the train schedule five times before I descend down into the station, and I use the ten-minute walk between stations to call someone because the streetlights are still too dim to feel safe. The metrics of safety for women are not perfect in Chicago either. There is a stark difference in security and lighting once you leave the Downtown Loop and enter the rest of the city. I am realizing that my bar for freedom of mobility for women has been so low that Chicago seemed a utopia to me, but only because it does provide a bare minimum for women which Karachi fails to do.
Here in Karachi, I drive my beat-up white Mira to pick up my friends Ariba and Mariyam because driving them around is safer than calling an Uber. We cruise the city in the hours between noon and maghrib (sunset), we dodge calls from our mothers when we cross the timestamp of 5 p.m., we hop from one cafe to another, and we end up at V.M Sanctuary, an indoor space to work.
We raise our cups of mediocre chai (tea), and we laugh about how we are the awara (wayward) girls in our families. The so-called progressives who have traded the four walls of our homes for the four walls of these cafes.