Contingency and Architectural Speculation

The tallest skyscraper and the oldest Sufi shrine vie for space and attention in Pakistan's largest city, Karachi. The newly constructed Bahria Icon Tower looms above the dome of the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, both structures etching a distinctive profile against the horizon (fig. 1). They have been forced together through suspicious real estate deals, kickbacks, and the sale of public property.¹ The sacred precincts of the shrine have been encroached on, and the homeless and indigent have been forced to sleep under nearby flyovers or seek shelter in the large lot that used to be a popular amusement park.

The skyscraper is at once a sign of prosperity and of national pride; the slum stands in contrast, as a marker of current, if hardly new, political and spatial realities. Such stark polarities are not surprising, when deep and insurmountable inequities define contemporary life across a region and a globe riven by disease and environmental degradation, where outside massive gated communities there are drying riverbeds, and at the foothills of new ecolodges are refugee communities displaced and rendered subhuman.

Architectural histories highlight such complexities, along with the manners in which stakeholders inscribe often conflicting strategies within the built environment. Interrogating the relevant histories and archives is an exercise that is at once bounded and political; it is also often dependent on numerous factors—on accidents of survival, the availability of sources, or the formation of a new body of knowledge. Like the spaces studied, their archives are linked to the past and yet are prophetic; their meanings are mutable and contingent on the users; and, most importantly, they are expressive of particular moments in time. Such is the case of this collection of essays on a region construed as South Asia and a discipline broadly defined as architecture. The period covered is from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, in other words, the late colonial period and the era of the fully formed nation-state. The essays delve deep into intangible motivations (for example, of an emigre and an architect), personal effects (such as sketches and letters), and ephemeral materials (film and vegetation), to expose architecture as both a field of inquiry and a process of interrogation.

The aim of this afterword is to serve as an addendum to the chronological and typological breadth of the collection, by focusing on a contemporary moment in what could be called a "global" city, Karachi.² The aim is also to highlight an important aspect of the articles, the transnational connections that bring the term South Asia itself into question. That is to say, there are no absolutes in terms of regional or nationalist narratives that cannot be subverted when looked at closely. Instead, what may better define the region's built environment is its dependence on mobility—of people, technology, capital, and ideology—as probed in the preceding articles. Here, I add two other dimensions—financial speculation and religion—which are not often juxtaposed together in the discourses of architecture or modernism, although they certainly define the ways in which cities in the South Asian subcontinent are inhabited, altered, and imagined.

Karachi does not, of course, represent the whole of Pakistan, nor do the South Asian nation-states represented in this collection (that is, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, but also including Afghanistan, Bhutan, the Maldives, and Nepal) satisfactorily account for all the populations and communities for whom the region is home (for example, those claiming independence, such as Kashmiris, or refugees and displaced people, such as the Rohingya). Indeed, the term is clumsy and ambiguous, supposedly describing a land mass but also geopolitical realities. Set up against the "Middle East" for example, South Asia is presented as a collective that, although heterodox in terms of traditions, languages, and religions, is connected through shared histories of trade, empire, and colonialism. What had once seemed like arbitrary lines drawn by colonial rulers have over the past three-quarters of a century hardened into more and more distinct territorial identities. Jokes once shared across regional languages (such as Pashto, Punjabi, and Bengali) are...