With American help, the dictator brought in Constantinos Doxiadis, then one of the world’s leading city planners. He designed sprawling new suburbs with subsidized homes along broad streets, intending to resettle half a million people — the rough equivalent of moving almost all of Washington’s population to a new location outside town.

During the construction, in 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower visited Pakistan and was flown over the new suburb of Korangi in a helicopter, as children stood in lines below to spell out, “I Like Ike.”

Pakistan’s government soon turned its attention to other projects, however, and the suburban construction drive fell apart. New suburbanites were building unauthorized homes much like the inner-city hovels from which the state had evicted them.

Today, informal settlement has become an industry spread over hundreds of square miles surrounding Karachi. Politically connected developers seize sections of government land and subdivide them into lots for new homes — as many as 100,000 per year.

Some are sprawling South Asian McMansions. Most are tiny row houses, where poor residents are left to dig their own sewers and steal electricity. The police have worked out a standard payoff to look the other way. In 2010, the going bribe was 5,000 rupees per lot, about $57.

But there are consequences to moving the real estate market beyond the law. Greed and emotions run high. Land battles contribute to gunfights between Karachi’s political parties — shootouts that kill far more people than terrorism does.

Violence disrupts what few government services are available in some areas. At an empty school I visited in October, the writing on the chalkboard showed that no teacher had been there since May 31. The teachers came from outside the neighborhood, and local gunfights made the commute too risky.