RUMANA Husain’s Street Smart is a testament to the diversity and dynamism of public spaces in Karachi. At a time when discussions about public space have become increasingly negative and narrow in scope — with constant complaints about lack of public spaces, land mafia usurpations, and most of all about urban violence taking over our beloved city — Husain enables her readers to rethink these scripted discourses and rediscover the multiplicity of people, socialities and spaces of the city. She reminds us that Karachi’s streets and public spaces are a source of livelihood and sustenance to hundreds of different professions and workers, from the street sweeper to the fruit vendor to the Ferris wheel operator.

Public space is often assumed to imply ‘openness’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘accessibility’. The new urban development projects in Karachi, from Port Grand to Bahria Tower to DHA City, tout ‘world-class development’. However, such developments practice a cruel and unreasonable urbanism by destroying Karachi’s vibrant street life through the creation of exclusionary, privatised and securitised spaces. They facilitate new capitalist relations of oppression and exploitation, by denying hawkers, vendors, and other persons who conduct their businesses on the streets their historic rights to the pavement.

In her book, Husain documents and archives people who work on the street, in an attempt to preserve the histories of these vulnerable and increasingly marginalised professionals and their trades. She provides site-authentic, first-hand documentation of over 60 street professionals, each from a different trade, sharing insight into their lives, work and struggles on the street. The story of each person is accompanied by their photograph. Admitting these faces into discursive view humanises their struggles for a large audience and encourages readers to empathise and apprehend the precariousness of their lives.

In Karachi’s history, ‘public’ has often been used as an alibi under whose protection authoritarian agendas are pursued and legitimised. In 1958, Ayub Khan launched a clean-up drive in Karachi called ‘Operation Chase’ aimed at ‘cleansing’ public spaces of gamblers, dens, beggars, hawkers, patients suffering from leprosy and any person seen as ‘obstructing public spaces’. Every subsequent government has launched similar initiatives. The most recent example is the initiation of ‘Restoration and Beautification of Saddar’ project in 2014, which plans to evict thousands of hawkers and vendors in order to carve out elite and exclusionary spaces of ‘beauty’ and ‘security’. Husain, through her meticulous archiving of street life, defies such conceptions of exclusionary spaces, and allows all professionals interviewed to stake a claim in their daily spaces.

Husain also pays special attention to the disappearing professions. She identifies the pinjara (cotton wool fluffer), purani cheez ke badle naye martabaan (barterer), dandaansaz (street dentist), kaan ki safai wala (ear cleaner) and kalaiwala (roaming tinsmith) as some of the professions that have either completely vanished or are fast disappearing.

She interviews Ahmad Baksh, a Sindhi-speaking kalaiwala who learnt the craft from his father when he was eight years old. He narrates that while a few decades ago he used to polish up to a 100 utensils in a day, he considers himself lucky to get one or two now. Therefore, Baksh made the conscious decision to not pass down the trade to any of his children. “What’s the point?” he asks, if to carry on this craft for the future means they “will remain caught in a web of poverty”. Such stories encourage readers to pause and reflect on contemporary consumer culture, where new commodities, technologies, sciences and conveniences are constantly relegating older things, services and people to the status of ‘the outmoded’. In this way, Karachi is losing many of its old street traditions.

Street Smart is an urgent reminder that the sociality, existences and histories of street professionals are a vital and dynamic part of Karachi’s urban spaces. It is their presence and struggles that produce and maintain many of Karachi’s public spaces. At a time when development and gentrification is changing the city’s spaces and marginalising its people at a fast pace, Husain’s book presents a timely and valuable research to make us re-think development more critically and acknowledge the crucial role of street professionals in maintaining Karachi’s public spaces.

Street Smart: Professionals on the Street

(PHOTO ESSAYS)

By Rumana Husain

Edited by Mukhtar Husain

Karachi Conference Foundation, Karachi

ISBN 978-9692305709

158pp.