Vantage: The KCR seems to represent a vision of optimism, yet also a sort of negative space against which life in the city can be considered. Can you unpack some of what you see in the remnants of the KCR, in real or symbolic terms?

Ivan Sigal: The territory of the railway has a curiously liminal character. It is still public land, owned by Pakistan Railways, which means that there are formal restrictions as to what can happen on it. At the same time, in every location around the city, elements of neighboring communities seep into or actively encroach upon the railway’s territory.

In some places, people have occupied parts of the railway’s land, building both temporary shelters and permanent housing or businesses, establishing markets, cricket fields, and transport shortcuts. Elsewhere it’s returned to nature, becoming a field of acacia thorns, or reeds, or wetlands.

In all this, the structures of the railway remain: footbridges, stations and platforms, shelters, tracks, switching lights, even though they barely seem to be noticed by the people occupying or passing through. It’s not a subject really worthy of comment on a daily basis, but rather has become so familiar as to be invisible.

V: What does life along the KCR reveal about Karachi that standard media narratives miss? What is at stake in correcting that narrative?

IS: The railway was created as a transport element for a rational urban plan, with suburban neighborhoods linked to areas of commerce, manufacturing, and the city’s port. Behind that was an idea for an open city, a city accessible to all its residents, just as Pakistan was imagined as a country to be open to all its citizens. Its failure is also a failure of that vision.

The underlying reasons for its failure have to do with the state’s inability to manage successive waves of migration into the city, and the informal processes by which neighborhoods were established, gained access to resources, and created security for themselves.

In many cases, newly arrived migrants received access to land and utilities and protection from groups affiliated with political parties, who in turn recruited these communities into their political blocs and voter rolls. This patronage created exclusive zones across the city, primarily available to the main ethnic, communal, or linguistic communities in each area, and inflaming tensions between them that are too often accompanied by violence.

That narrative, of the sources of conflict in Karachi and the incentives people have to pursue violence, is quite different from mass media depictions of Karachi as a city overwhelmed by crime, terror and counter-terror. It places our understanding of conflict in relationship to structural issues — access to resources, to land, to opportunity for whole communities, instead of in relationship to personal narratives — groups of criminals or terrorists who mindlessly kill for base desires.