The current explosive growth of South Asian cities was the impetus for the Contemporary South Asian City Conference this month in Karachi, Pakistan, where Rahul Mehrotra (chair and professor of urban planning and design) gave the first guest lecture, titled “Kinetic City.” He was attending as part of a Harvard team that included Spiro Pollalis (professor of design, technology and management) and Justin D. Stern (PhD student in urban planning and design), as well as representatives from the School of Public Health, South Asia Institute (a co-sponsor of the conference) and Harvard Medical School.
The scale of the conference was appropriate to the scale of the issue: since the conference was free and open to all, thousands of practitioners, scholars, government officials and policymakers attended. Mehrotra has been closely observing the fast-track evolution of South Asian cities, and he issued a warning: “Our cities are becoming complex and highly susceptible to malfunction because we are ignoring evolutionary gestures.” He also gave a rallying cry, “We have many cities that will soon become 1 million-people cities, and urban planners and designers can make a big difference to how things evolve in these municipalities.”
Spiro Pollalis was discussant for the panel “Professional Practice in South Asia” and participated on the panel “Constructing the ‘Right to the City’ in South Asia: Housing, Governance & the Civic Realm,” for which Stern was discussant.
Read more about the conference and a review of Mehrotra’s presentation.