Q. What motivated you to write the book?
A. I have always been fascinated with cities — the larger and noisier, the better. When I first visited Karachi in 2001, I knew that I had found my own ‘maximum city’. And while being interested in the local histories of its various settlements, I decided to adopt a synoptic perspective, which would try to make sense of the wonder that is Karachi, as a whole. Journalists and scholars alike denigrated it as a “chaotic city”, an ungovernable, utterly unpredictable urban mass. If I wanted to counter these dominant narratives, I had to adopt the same wide frame of analysis and show that, as a whole, Karachi does work despite and sometimes through violent unrest.

A Pakistani youth places an oil lamp next to a photograph of child activist Malala Yousafzai as they pay tribute in Karachi in October 2012. Pic/AFP

Q. You describe Karachi’s violence as an “ordered disorder”. Is this unique to Karachi or is it because it was a former colony?
A. Karachi’s violent politics is in a permanent state of flux as the balance of power between public and private aspirants to authority and wealth is continuously shifting. I do not think that this violent configuration is specific to post-colonial contexts. Karachi shares many of its attributes with Colombian cities affected by the global economy of the drug trade, for instance. Thus, Karachi’s chronic violence is primarily an offshoot of the Afghan Jihad, which democratised the access to firearms and gave birth to lucrative criminal markets that dramatically upset the social and spatial fabric of the city.