Sit at any tea shop or wedding in this city, and you will hear the same nostalgic sentence: “Karachi used to be so beautiful. It was the City of Lights.”
But if we are honest and if we look back 35 or 40 years without rose-tinted glasses, this so-called “Golden Era” feels like a myth we tell ourselves to feel better. The truth is harder to swallow: Karachi has never really had a plan. It has never been managed by people who understand beauty or order. This city has always grown out of “necessity,” never out of “design.”
The First Impression: An Embarrassing Welcome: Before we talk about the heart of the city, let’s look at its front door. The first impression is the lasting one. Yet, look at our entry points.
When a guest lands at Jinnah International Airport or steps off a train at Cantt Station, what is their first view? It isn’t a modern metropolis. It is clutter, encroachments, and debris. Our highways, which should be the pride of the city, are lined with dust and trash. If we can’t even keep our “welcome mats” clean, we have already lost the battle for the city’s image.
The Myth of the “Good Old Days: People treat the Karachi of the 70s and 80s as if it were Paris. It wasn’t. Even then, the slums (Katchi Abadis) were in bad shape. Open drains and overflowing gutters were common in 1980, just as they are in 2026.
The only difference is that back then, the population was smaller, so the filth was easier to hide. Today, with millions more people, the smell is impossible to ignore. The rot isn’t new; it has just become too big to sweep under the rug.
The Death of Taste (Aesthetics): The city’s biggest tragedy is that our planners and contractors seem to have zero sense of beauty. You can see it in the colors they choose. Look at our bridges and government buildings painted in shocking yellows and mismatched blacks that hurt the eyes. It doesn’t look developed; it looks cheap.
Take a walk in Hill Park. The pond there could be a beautiful spot for families. Instead, it is filthy. It is a mirror showing how little we care about our recreational spots. Even when we spend money on expensive paver blocks for footpaths, they look ugly because the laborers aren’t trained to finish the job properly. It looks broken before it is even used.
Overworked and outdated: We have the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB), but watching them work is exhausting. The system suffers from “fatigue.” The workers look overburdened, and their methods are old. Unless we modernize how they work and make their jobs easier, the department will remain slow, and the city will remain buried under trash.
Festivals: A Reason to Clean Up: A happy city is a busy city. We need more cultural and seasonal festivals, not just for fun, but because festivals force the government to work.
You cannot hold a literature festival or a carnival if the ground is flooded or the toilets are broken. We need to learn to celebrate our seasons. In the rest of the world, rain is a blessing; here, it is a curse (zahmat). If we planned festivals around the monsoon or spring, the administration would be forced to fix the drainage and parks to make the event happen. Culture can drive development.
The Real Solution: Exposure and Leadership: Our schools teach subjects, but they don’t teach “civic sense.” We aren’t teaching our kids that keeping a street clean is part of our faith and civilization.
Furthermore, our decision-makers need exposure. They need to travel not to sit in VIP meetings but to walk the streets of Japan or the UAE to see how they maintain public toilets and trains. We need a “Family Visit” test: Every Minister and bureaucrat should be required to visit a public park with their family once every six months without protocol.
When they have to walk on the broken footpaths and smell the open gutters personally, only then will they feel the urgency to fix them.
Conclusion: Cities don’t become beautiful by magic; they have to be made beautiful. A city is like a garden. If you don’t prune it, it becomes a wild jungle. That is what happened to Karachi.
We need to stop crying about a lost paradise that never really existed. Instead, we need to teach the next generation the art of living. If we don’t, our identity will be buried forever under piles of concrete and dust.
