The Production of an Urban Hazardscape in Pakistan: Modernity, Vulnerability, and the Range of Choice

Abstract

This article reconsiders vulnerability to contemporary hazards within the context of a globalizing world, characterized by the hegemony of technocratic and social modernity. It presents findings of a field study conducted on flood hazard in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation in Pakistan. Insights from three intellectual traditions within resource geography—pragmatism, political ecology, and “socionature”—are coupled with the landscape idea within cultural geography to develop the integrative concept of a “hazardscape.” This concept is defined as both an analytical way of seeing that asserts power and as a social-environmental space where the gaze of power is contested and struggled against to produce the lived reality of hazardous places. Analyses of the Lai Nullah hazardscape in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation reveal that flood victims perceive a much greater range of choice in dealing with the flood hazard than do policy makers. On the other hand, flood managers, typically state agents, see a very limited range of choice because of their modernist technocratic engagement with the Lai hazardscape. The hazardscape concept engages the social structural basis of vulnerability as well as the power/knowledge dynamic governing policy and popular discourses on flood hazard in the Lai. Analysis through the lens of the hazardscape helps expand the range of choice and suggests pragmatic solutions to hazardous situations.

Key Words:

• hazardscape
• vulnerability
• Pakistan
• pragmatism
• socionature

Acknowledgments

Field research for this manuscript was funded by a grant from the University of South Florida, Research Council. I am grateful to the late Rubina Tariq, Muhammad Arif, Sultan Mehmood, and the leadership and staff of LEAD-Pakistan, particularly Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, Isma Sana, Usman Qazi, and Imran Butt, who assisted with and facilitated the research and writing of this manuscript. The article has benefited from the comments and editorial reviews of the earlier drafts by Sharon Lash and Thomas Smucker. I must also thank the four anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Annals, whose candid comments have helped improve the article. The remaining weaknesses in the article are entirely my own doing.

Notes

1. This spelling comes closest to the phonetic pronunciation of the name and is most widely used. Other spellings, for example, Leh and Lei, are also in use.

2. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and armaments minister, was on the faculty of this institute when Doxiadis was a student there.

3. By the European sense, I mean the relatively recognizable division of economic classes in the industrialized societies of Europe, for example, the working class, the petit bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie, and the ruling classes (See also Gramsci 1971).

4. Mr. Mehmood, a resident of Rawalpindi and one of the most ardent environmentalists and an acknowledged friend of the Lai, was very insistent on this particular point. At every forum where I saw him talking about the Lai, he insisted that it was not a nullah but a nadi (stream), which should be respected as such. He frequently cited the richness of aquatic life that used to exist in the Lai and still does in its head reaches in the form of local river bass, turtles, and other types of flora and fauna.

5. This discussion is not meant to imply that this subtle change of terminology is solely to blame for the condition of the Lai. In fact, Lai was a rich aquatic system with recreational fishing and swimming on its banks up to twenty-five years ago. The point is that in the official, as well as some popular, references to the Lai, it becomes more difficult for environmentalists and citizens to make a case for saving a nullah, as opposed to a river or stream; that is, it would sound absurd in the local language for somebody wanting to save a nullah or declaring herself, or himself, a friend of the nullah (drain)!

6. Watersheds have increasingly become a popular scale for social mobilization and environmental activism in the United States. The politics and mechanics of environmental activism around the watershed scale have been documented, among others, by Woolley, McGinnis, and Kellner (2002) and Woolley (1999).