10: URBAN LABS IN TIMES OF CONFLICT AND POST-TRUTH - A conversation with Mona Fawaz & Nausheen Anwar

In this month’s feature, Beth and Tom are joined by Professors Nausheen Anwar and Mona Fawaz, Directors of the Karachi Urban Lab and Beirut Urban Lab respectively. This feature is a live recording of an in-person event on Urban Research Labs in Times of Conflict and Post-Truth, recorded in July as part of the Sheffield Urbanism Summer Programme. 

This was an ‘in conversation’ event during which Tom and Beth explored the challenges that Mona and Nausheen face running urban labs in the face of persistent conflict, misinformation and authoritarianism. The conversation ranges from the origin and motivation for establishing their research labs, to the ways in which they curate urban data as a public good for advocacy and activism, to some of the specific issues on which they work including housing crises, climate change and migration.

Guest biographies: 

Nausheen Anwar is the Founder and Director of the Karachi Urban Lab (KUL), which was set up in 2016 in a context where data production on the ‘urban’ in Pakistan remains top-down and largely technocratic. The KUL sees its role to fill a ‘gap’ in data/knowledge production from the ground up and in a critically oriented way. Nausheen is also a Professor of City & Regional Planning in the Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts (SSLA), IBA and Urban climate resilience lead and principal researcher, IIED's Human Settlements research group. 

Mona Fawaz is co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, a regional research center invested in working towards more inclusive, just, and viable cities. The Lab produces scholarship on urbanization by documenting and analyzing ongoing transformation processes in Lebanon and its region's natural and built environments. It works towards materializing a vision of an ecosystem of change empowered by critical inquiry and engaged research, and driven by committed urban citizens and collectives. Mona is a Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut.

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Thanks to AbdouMaliq Simone and the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research Humanity's Urban Future programme for supporting the visit and podcast. 

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: urbanradarpod@gmail.com

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:11

Hello. In this month's episode, we ask: In the context of continued regional conflict in the Middle East and the recent flare-up of hostilities between India and Pakistan, how do urban research labs in Beirut and Karachi see their role in relation to the production of data and evidence?

SPEAKER_00 0:27

And how do such conflicts influence the politics of knowledge production in relation to issues such as emerging technology, climate change, migration and property relations?

SPEAKER_02 0:37

And finally, how do urban research labs position themselves in wider ecosystems of change in the context of fractured states and publics? Welcome to Urban Radar. I'm Beth Perry, a professor in the Urban Institute.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

And I'm Tom Goodfellow, a professor in the School of Geography and Planning here at the University of Sheffield.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

So, Tom, what have we got coming up this month?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Right, so this is an unusual feature in the sense that it was a live public event, a conversation between ourselves and Noshin Anwar of the Korachi Urban Lab, Professor Noshin Anwar and Professor Mona Forwaz of the Beirut Urban Lab. And we invited these two people, among our other international visitors, who came recently to visit us for a workshop. And we asked them to speak on the theme of urban labs in times of conflict and post-truth.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

And if we do say so ourselves, this is a really powerful and hard-hitting feature. And if you were in the live audience, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife because everyone was on tender hooks and gripped by the dynamic of these two incredible and inspiring women talking about the work they do under such very difficult circumstances. And apart from the electrifying atmosphere in the audience, um it was also quite intimidating to do it in front of a live audience.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

It was, of course, you've done one live before, uh, although it wasn't, you know, uh build as a podcast, whereas this was always going to be recorded for urban radar. So we really hope you enjoy it because it is a very serious listen, but a very interesting Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

And we introduced both Mona and Nasheen fully in the feature. So let's turn to that now. Yes, welcome everyone. Um, we've been delighted to be able to host this event this week as part of our Sheffield Urbanism Summer Programme. We have visitors in the room from China, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil for these global urban dialogues and probably many more places as well. Tonight we have the privilege of speaking with Mona and Nashine to learn together about the kinds of research challenges that we're all facing, how we can address them, and how we can mobilize knowledge for social justice in the kind of wider ecosystems of change. And we can't obviously emphasize enough how critical this is at this particular juncture, marked by genocide, herbicide, war, and conflict around the world, with new strategies and tactics of warfare, including urban intelligence itself. So it's never more important to think about the role of research and how we organise knowledge production to work on and in these different contexts. So, Mona and Nasheen have a huge amount of experience. I'm just going to give the brief bit of background to each of them. So, first, Nasheen Anwar is the founder and director of the Karachi Urban Lab. The Karachi Urban Lab was set up in 2016 in a context where data production on the urban in Pakistan remained really top-down and largely technocratic. And so we've been really inspired by the way that the Karachi Urban Lab sees its role to kind of fill this gap in data and knowledge production from the ground up but in a really critically oriented way. Nashine's also a professor in city and regional planning in the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the IBA, and it's urban climate resilience lead and principal researcher also in IIED's Human Settlements Research Group. And her work is inspiring around thermal justice, the relationship between the built environment, vulnerability, climate change hazards, and the kinds of post-colonial histories and contexts of infrastructural violence, land displacement, and antipoor urban planning in the global south.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Anne Munafoaz is the co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, a regional research centre invested in working towards more inclusive, just and viable cities. The lab produces scholarship on urbanization by documenting and analyzing ongoing transformation processes in Lebanon and in its regions in the natural and built environment. It works towards materializing a vision of an ecosystem of change empowered by critical inquiry and engaged research and driven by committed urban citizens and collectives. Muna is a professor in urban studies and planning at the American University of Beirut, and her research spans across urban history and historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, land, housing, property and space, as well as planning, practice, theory, and pedagogy. Welcome both of you. So I want to begin by talking a little bit about the origins of your research labs. Muna, I believe that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was a founding moment for the Beirut Urban Lab, although you only consolidated as an actual lab sometime later. Over the almost two decades since that time, the world and city have transformed in so many ways, and yet the threat and reality of invasion and violence have remained horribly present. So, what have been some of the main changes in your priorities and your ways of working over this period? And how do you make sense of the evolution of your work over these two very turbulent decades?

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Thanks. First, thank you so much for hosting us and for this engaging debate. If I want to start with the origins of the Beirut Urban Lab, I think it was a number of us first faculty members at the American University of Beirut with very different disciplinary interests that came together feeling that the south of the country was devastated with yet one more war, and we had to do something. And so we began to try to look for ways of intervening. And in that context, we quite naively went to different municipalities, and each one of us was working with a public sector actor. And we came back and we discussed together, and that began to be sort of a way of collaborating and thinking together. But our theory of change at that time was very much that we could produce good science, produce data, put forward proposals in co-production with communities, and that these would be implemented. I think the main thing we've learned in the last 20 years is that that's not a viable theory of change, at least definitely not in our context, and increasingly we're hearing this from colleagues elsewhere as well. So I think over the years we've begun to elaborate different theories of change. And I think we've matured around the idea that as a of establishing a research lab and thinking of ourselves not so much as drivers of change but as part of an ecosystem. And to play our role in honesty, modestly as a research center. We try to produce data, we try to create narratives, we try to formulate claims, we try to think about who else is striving for a more just, more viable word, and we try to sort of think about the kind of knowledge that could support their endeavors as well. So I think we've become gradually part of a system where we play our role as researchers with other academics. So we are we we think of ourselves as producing critical urban knowledge in conversation with colleagues elsewhere, but we're also very much in conversation with a number of public actors who want change, with activists, with uh some of the local community groups. I don't like to call them communities. Uh most of them don't like to live with each other, so it's difficult to think of it as a coherent uh collective. But we've tried to sort of see how by producing data, by producing stories and claims, we connect them. And I think that's sort of the main change for me over that period.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Thank you very much. Um I just want to turn to you now, Nasheen. Uh, we talked about 2006 there. Was there a similar moment, critical juncture, that spurred a group of you to set up the Karachi Urban Lab or what became that lab? And again, how have your priorities changed since that time?

SPEAKER_03 8:32

Yeah, thank you very much, Tom, for that question. And uh thank you also to Beth and you for inviting me to be a part of this incredibly stimulating workshop and then this event over here, and especially to be in conversation with Mona, because the Veruth Urban Lab has been a source of tremendous inspiration for the Karachi Urban Lab as well. So there've been many, many moments, right? So these moments have a lot to do with uh with my positionality in terms of being in a particular location in a particular geography that is called Karachi, which is embedded in Pakistan, with specific kinds of post-colonial histories and political economies of martial rule, three specifically, and the decimation of the social sciences and critical thinking, right? So a lot of that inspiration to set up a lab, which I actually never thought would last beyond a couple of years, to be perfectly honest, is coming from that moment. That how do you take the anchor of critical thinking in a public sector university that is now supporting the social sciences and bring together a group of colleagues? And there are essentially four of us, and one of them actually, Mohammed Tawid, is that Jonathan Silver's event that took place today on Global Corridors because we were collaborating with him on a project. And so it's there are four of us, and in any given moment in time, depending upon funding, it could be 20 of us. So the impetus was really then to do exactly what our mission statement is on our website, is to produce data from the ground up that sort of very quietly and sometimes in a very spectacular fashion challenges discourses of data production and truths, whatever those might be, that are more technocratic and top-down. And to do them on the basis of taking very critical positions about issues of housing and evictions and displacement, and uh and especially in the post-9-11 context on violence. So Karachi has long histories of violence, embedded in uh in the post-1947 context, in the issues of displacement, housing evictions, etc., that continue to this day, also which dovetails with you know this disaster risk mitigation, revanchist dynamics. But in the pre-in the pre-decolonization context has to do with British colonial rule, its linkages with Afghanistan and so forth. So these are deep histories of violence that also then dovetail with very important questions that we produce on, that we try to engage with on the production of knowledge. How have our priorities changed? It's an exhausting process, and we were talking about this yesterday also. Uh so one of our uh sort of missions or our very important interventions is to bring um municipal actors on board in terms of sharing data, and that's a very, very difficult thing to do. Because in the context of local governance systems, which are pretty much fairly non-existent in the Pakistan context, and especially in Karachi, the histories of violence and national politics and regional politics are very, very complicated. So you would have in any given moment a really committed uh municipal officer who engages with us and we sign MOUs and we do all of that, and that might last for nine months because he gets posted. So so much of our data and our interventions to actually sort of, for instance, on risk mitigation for informing local adaptation plans and so forth gets kind of you know wound up in this politics and might dissipate. But so one of the things that we're really very, very seriously committed to now, which where we feel we have a much stronger foothold in terms of sustainability is mentorship and capacity building of our faculty, our young researchers, where Kraut Shia has really turned into, and especially when we have a good amount of funding in place, to take on young researchers and to create leverage and moments of mobility for them. And uh, and I'm very proud to say we've been very successful at this. So taking our young researchers who've been with us for seven, eight years, who found uh avenues to promote themselves, to get PhD funding and go overseas because in Pakistan these opportunities are very, very limited, whether it's in city and regional planning or anthropology. So this really has become a very important foothold for us and a very consistent and a sustainable one for now at least.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Thank you. I think the picture you paint of these ecosystems of change that you find yourselves located in is really interesting and also really tactical, isn't it, in terms of by how you're mobilizing the state or different parts of the remnants of the state, these ideas of quiet aloud activism. But the other thing that really comes through from just listening between you is around the deeply rooted nature of the response to the critical urgencies in each of your contexts. So in Machine, I know that Karachi is one of the most vulnerable cities to climate change globally, and there's this particularly acute combination of extreme heat, stress, water scarcity, and flooding risk. So, in terms of the ways that you operate, the ecosystems of change that you find yourselves within, you know, how do you sort of think about those kinds of particular critical urgencies and what kinds of data and analysis can help you navigate the politics of those kinds of issues, the politics of heat, the politics of climate crisis?

SPEAKER_03 13:35

So thank you very much, Beth. That's a brilliant question. So I'm going to answer that in two ways. So, first of all, you know, everything is contingent on having funding, right? So we have the money, then you can you can roll out certain kinds of projects that enable us then to put in place what are hopefully transdisciplinary methods. So on extreme heat, especially over the last few years, we've we've been involved in several projects with collaborators here in the United Kingdom, in India, and in Malaysia and in parts of Africa. And these collaborations continue to grow. And one of the things that we've learned is that the more transdisciplinary the nature of our research on extreme heat, uh, the more well placed we are in terms of understanding the complexities of extreme heat vis-a-vis not only cities like Karachi, but many secondary cities across Pakistan. So one of our projects actually these days is with a climate scientist at King's College London. And we've just launched a project on the city of Jacobabad, which is kind of the poster child of, uh has become the poster child of being one of the hottest cities in the world where ambient temperatures exceed 51 Celsius, right? Not WBGTs, but ambient temperatures. So now, um, so working in different contexts uh where when you're investigating extreme heat in terms of these transdisciplinary methods is very exciting, but can also become very, very precarious because, for instance, the city of Jayquabad lies not too far from uh you know the border of India. So we found ourselves uh, you know, right in the middle of, was it April, kind of when the whole war issue was upon us. Uh, and just before that, in February, when we had launched the project and our uh colleagues had come from King's College. Uh, we were being followed by different variations of intelligence agencies, and there are many, many, many, many, many intelligence agencies in Pakistan. And that became really, that became a huge obstacle in terms of how, you know, how how you place yourself in the context of different kinds of communities, how you identify interlocutors and nonprofit and non-governmental organizations. So having allies on board, and we were talking about allies yesterday, becomes exceedingly important. So how you choose them, how you go about selecting them, how you ensure that they are protected and you are protected, and how your research protocols are protected. The ethics of all of this becomes very, very complicated in these kinds of contexts. So I've worked in Karachi long enough to know about those ethical protocols, and myself, along with several of my young researchers, have been sort of on the front end of, you know, of being hounded, of being questioned, all of that. But one of the surprising things was moving to the city like Jacobabad, where I had sort of worked a little bit on and off, and finding this full-on and not realizing this. So the ethical, political aspect of this, which is very regional but is also very Pakistani state-oriented, you know, becomes a question of the why, the when, and the who, you know, whom do you create alliances with? Do you have these guys? And you know, I mean, the moment we entered Jekobabad and our we arrived at our at our rest house, there were three intelligence officers who were sitting there waiting for us, literally. Yeah. Right. So take out your CNIC cards and why is she here, and why are you here, and what are you investigating? These things become a huge impediment. So we're right, sort of we're in the midst of now working out the logistics of all of these things as we continue with our work in Shrikova. That, you know, are we going to, how are we going to confront all of this? Uh, and uh, how do we go along sort of with the protocols of researching heat in the context of the heat of this kind of politics, right? So it's two kinds of heat that fall upon us, you know, essentially.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

And two kinds of intelligence as well, because there's the intelligence services that are doing to you whilst you're trying to produce these different kinds of intelligence at the same time. Absolutely. And just with that, I want to turn to you a bit, Mona, because I mean, obviously, we we had a conversation today about post-truth economics preceding post-truth politics. And I think that's really interesting when we turn to Lebanon, when we turn to Beirut. Because Lebanon's been the epicentre of one of the worst financial crises globally in modern times, and the site of both really declining living standards and then extraordinary amounts of property speculation. So, this question, this rent speculation, the extraction, and you as your lab have done a huge amount of work on this particular issue, pioneering work mapping the spatial dimensions of the crisis and working with different data sets. Can you tell us a bit more about what you've done and what other cities might learn from that experience?

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Sure. So, um, I mean, as you note in the last five years, what has happened in Lebanon is beyond any imagination. I mean, we've had uh a war with an influx of refugees that makes us the country that has the highest percentage of refugees per capita in the world, followed by financial meltdown where our currency literally lost in one year more than 90% of its value. Government resign, no more president, no more state, uh, and then the war with Israel and COVID. So you remember how COVID was for all of you. Imagine that all of these things came with it. And so it's true that you get to the point where you feel very uh overwhelmed and disempowered. And this changes everything that you're trying to uh sort of it it gets you to the point where you feel there's not much we can do. We are very disempowered. And so for us, it was trying to understand what disempowers people, trying to start making a claim. And one of the things that was very clear is that there was very little knowledge about the city itself. So for years we've all been working, there's not even a base map of Beirut. So every research project starts with creating a new base map. That means you can't overlap data, you can collect things, you can't allow people to collaborate. And so we began that exercise of asking first, why isn't there any knowledge about the city when we know that it used to exist? And I think there's a deliberate effort at unmapping, at making things informal. Because the more things are informal, the more murky decisions can happen, the more privatization can happen, the more you can allow dirty money to come into real estate and specific property, actually wealth transfer to happen, which is really what we were all experiencing. So we began that exercise of trying to create a base map of the city and then to try to lay on this basemap any kind of data sets we could find or conduct any kind of surveys we could produce so that we have that knowledge about Beirut and find an entry point somewhere that can resonate with people, something you can ask, you can claim that can bring people together. And I think that's where we I mean, I'll just give you one example, which is that question of uh vacancy that we discussed, which is right, it also affects London, affects a lot of cities. But every time we went and said, look, we're noticing in the neighborhoods where we live, all the new buildings are dark. Who's buying these apartments? Nobody lives in them. We were told, oh, you just look at your neighborhood, it's anecdotal. When we surveyed building by building everything that had been built in the last 30 years, we could come back and say 23% of the apartments that are new are unfurnished, unused, completely unused, and they don't pay taxes. Um, nobody uh asks who owns them, how it works. And that began to help us then gradually build networks with lawyers, to write a law, to ask to task vacancy, but also to work with activists to make claims to show what is happening in the city. So the social media took it, the newspapers republish it, and that sort of creates locally a story about that issue of vacancy that then gets ground. Um, and so I think experiences, what experiences like this can tell other cities, and we're getting a lot of labs, a lot of cities, regionally, or colleagues in cities saying, How did you do it? is that actually with today's technologies, you can very simply begin to build these layers and produce a coalition of researchers. And the data eventually becomes some form of a commons, something that encourages people to work together. So today I think of the lab as sort of a one of the biggest things we've been able to achieve is that data commons. So we get PhD students who come and want to do their research, and we say, why don't we help you collect the data? And in two years it becomes an open data set that anyone else can use. And gradually we now know way more about infrastructures. I don't do research about infrastructures, but I know about electricity, I know about water. Because of these kinds of overlaps. So I think there's something to be learned, particularly in contexts where there is no institutional production of knowledge, where there is no reference, you can't know how many people live here, there's never been a census. You can begin to play that role from a university.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

I think it's really I just want to put that in the context of the current onslaught on Gaza spilling over into Lebanon. The mapping work has taken on such an additional significance in the context of war and herbicide. And one of the things that really strikes me when I listen comparatively to what you're saying is that we are increasingly talking about action research, but you're actually turning back to a kind of knowledge activism itself in the truest sense, where it's knowledge for advocacy. I was wondering if you could just say something about how you've kind of turned back to that traditional function in order to provide the kind of evidence that activists can then use in this context.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

I think if I can say one thing about the mapping. So in the last uh year and a half, uh we turned around a little bit from our mapping on housing and began to map the impact of Israel's bombing on Lebanon. Uh, and then we expanded this to work on similar projects in the West Bank and in Gaza. And we use the same technologies that we had. There's an anecdote for why this happens that you'll like, because it's the uncertainty. Things keep happening. Um the second day after October 7, uh, drones started flocking inside Lebanon and jamming all our GPSs. So we were so excited about being able to use geographic information systems and collect information with your phones. For a year and a half, we lived in Gamman International Airport. Anytime you wanted to go, our GPS was not working. You you can imagine what it meant to the younger generation that had never driven around without a GPS. I am older, so it was a little bit more comfortable. But part of this was we couldn't anymore do the kind of work that we did. And at the same time, what happens when you're in the middle of the war and there's bombing and families are getting affected is that everyone starts only watching the news, and you are turned forcefully into just a consumer. So the first second day after the war, I walk in the lab, and the lab is that la la land that makes you continue to survive in a city like Beirut. You go in, there's young researchers, they're excited, they're asking you questions. And the question, and everyone was watching the news, and I was sort of like, oh my god, no, not here. Please shut down the news. What can we do? And so we had that brainstorming session. What can we do? What can we use from our data? It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be about Beirut, it doesn't have to be about anything, but how can we deploy what we know in our methods to make a difference? And this is how we came up with the idea of basically using our day, any data set we could find and map the bombs to show the impact of the bombs and to begin some kind of media activism. So that was sort of work on the side, then what we do, it's an extension of our methods. It became very effective, first and foremost, as a tool of maintaining your sanity. Feeling that you're an active actor that's participating in shaping a narrative critically at a moment where you're seeing one village after another being erased, and people arriving in the city, Beirut doubled in numbers overnight, and you had to also do the relief work, etc., and continue to be a researcher. So these things together become very difficult. And so I think this mapping is really important in making us think that we're we are researchers based in universities, but we can't think of ourselves as only that. We are also citizens, and that and we shouldn't just we should be able to deploy that knowledge in difficult moments. The other thing about the war that's really important and it's is the breakdown in the last two years of everything we thought we knew about the reality of our world. So we had lived three, four, four wars with Israel in the last 30 years that I can remember. And in all these wars, we had the certainty that there is an international human rights order that will at some point intervene and stop the war. And when the bomb started falling on Beirut last September, the incredible fear we had is the perspective of the word on Gaza. And I want to say that because I think that again, we're urban scholars, but our theory of change is carried by that sense that there's justice, there's rules, and ultimately these guide where we do. And what we saw with Gaza is that it could also happen to us overnight, is that the perspective of international law can completely disappear. And these are things that then make it really hard to continue to be an editor for ITR, review papers for colleagues, uh, and and play the academic game. And I think this dissonance makes it more and more difficult to um to connect our words together.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

So thank you so much. I mean, you've mentioned this loss of certainty and also having to rely on watching the news for periods and that the passive feeling. I mean, that's obviously heightened by the rise in disinformation and misinformation that we've seen, particularly at key junctures. And I want to turn to you, Narshin, because uh during the recent conflagration between India and Pakistan, there was an alarming rise in uh fake information, fake imaging of various kinds, AI generated. Um, and I wondered in that context, you know, what what Mona said a little bit about how you know labs can obviously reclaim a sense of agency for people in the face of that. But how how did you think about addressing that in the context of your work in Pakistan?

SPEAKER_03 27:41

Yeah, uh to so to be perfectly frank, in that moment in April, we were absolutely scattered. And uh so and so when the sort of the war machinery began to unfold itself, we were sitting in Sheikh Abupad, and uh and in the middle of the night, my two colleagues and I, Soha, Taheed and I, uh, we I mean our families just became frantic, right? We were supposed to launch a series of surveys and so forth, and then we would hold the airport set shut down and that the internal road systems were going to be shut down also, so we just drove back to Karachi, and literally it was like stay at home, do nothing. And then doing exactly what Mona suggested, which is watching social media and the news, and then the disinformation coming out of India, and even actually thinking about how much disinformation is the Pakistani state itself generating. And uh, so I wanted sort of position this notion of what labs can do in the broader conversation of the Pakistani state itself. And so this is this has been a very interesting moment in terms of geopolitics for that region where China has emerged as a very, very big player, right? I mean, China-Pakistan sort of bonding goes back a long way to the 1970s ping-pong diplomacy and all of that, if you're a history buff. And the entire deterrence model that Pakistan is now putting in place in terms of its uh sort of um, you know, sort of hormonally testosterone-charged air force that has been bumped up by the Chinese with its JC-10s that brought the French, you know, planes down and launched its attack on India has become kind of the anchor, celebrating now the military, essentially. So in that moment of the hybrid state where this face of democracy and uh civil liberties perhaps being sort of you know coming to the forefront in a more positive way, was always questionable, and uh democracy coming on board and all of that, always questionable, has kind of withdrawn back a bit more, right? Because this moment has given, and I'm saying this out loud over here, right, the Pakistan military, the force and the capacity to come back in even stronger, essentially. So the internal warfare is there, right? It's it's military already is imposing its authority in the courts, it's already imposing its authority in terms of what's happening in Gilgit Baltistan in terms of activists who have been uh you know charged and are disappearing. And Balochistan, old story, the Pakistan military only needs an excuse. I mean, this is you know, keeping cognizant of all the you know the regional tensions vis-a-vis India and Iran and so forth in the picture. So, what does this mean for the kind of work that we do? Simply put, we can't generate any maps. Why? Because over the last five or six years, uh the defense ministry has come up with this little sort of you know rule that in order to generate maps, doesn't matter if they are national maps of Pakistan or regional maps or city-related maps, you have to get clearance from them, right? You have to go through these loopholes, uh, through these, sorry, not loopholes, but these procedures where you have to seek clearance from certain entities that are backed by the military, by the defense ministry. So it's uh so I'll give you an example. So Dawn News is a leading national English publication in Pakistan, and they have been generating very interesting maps on terrorism in the post-9-11 context and on many, many other issues. They have this whole data set, they cannot, they cannot show it under any circumstances. So we and we could use it, but we can't use it and show it in other ways to support our work. So, in the context of these kinds of impediments that are political economy related, so how do you kind of resist that moment? You really can't, right? So uh so much of the information then that we exchange has to remain very quiet and very underhanded and maybe published deep, deep somewhere in a journal that no one will read. So, you know, so we know that uh, well, very few people for the Marx Parks and Military will even read our publications. Who reads a KUL's publications? Maybe just a handful of people. So hopefully the maps that we produced in the past will won't get noticed, right? And we produced a lot of stuff on evictions and displacements. This was an IDRC funded three-year project, and we put a lot of information out there. We haven't really been approached by any military or defense person or, you know, saying to us, well, you know, you didn't get clearance, you didn't get permission. But now we're very, very cautious, exceedingly cautious in terms of the mapping exercises that we produce. So we are working in these kinds of environments that now make it a lot harder for us, you know, to have these free movements in terms of intellectual growth and and and engage in these in the so on the Jacob Arthur project, you know, we want to do a lot of mapping, but we're thinking about, well, how are we going to do it? Because there's a military air force base right next door. You know, so uh how do you do you kind of buff it out? Do you do you do you eliminate the borders? You know, how do you how do you do that?

SPEAKER_00 32:39

So uh Yeah, it's interesting because the more you talk, it's clear that the challenges in some ways you're dealing with are very different, right? You you've got a very powerful and overbearing militarized state in Pakistan, and in Lebanon, the state is barely there. But you're both obviously faced with challenges of of severe kind of conflict um and disinformation. But I just want to focus on again the things in some ways you have in common, which is a young population and a long history of migration, and how you kind of fold those things into your work and thinking about the future, I guess. So, particularly starting with Karachi, where I believe it's one of the youngest populations in the world, uh certainly I think in Asia, the city population. And I know that among our community here there is a lot of interest in childhood and youth. We've been talking about it quite a lot today. Um, so could you tell us a bit about how the work of urban labs um can engage the next generation more effectively than any generation before, as it will need to to address the urban challenges that will shape their lives?

SPEAKER_03 33:34

So there are many, many different ways of engaging with the youth dynamic in cities like Karachi and across urban centres of Pakistan. One of the projects that we are very keenly investigating, and and we want a welcome trust grant, a small welcome trust grant for a pallet project, is actually looking at the relationship between extreme heat malnutrition and uh and uh and mobility. And this was for a call on global health and and mobility that the Wellcome Trust and the No No Risk Foundation put out. And and one of the things that we're very we were very keen, and we're hoping that this project will go forward now, is looking really at uh at um at women as as uh internally displaced women as carers who are looking after their families and the youth aspect and the you know the the the infant children aspect becomes a very important part of that because uh malnutrition, especially in relation to how do you think in terms of synemics, right? So this is my transdisciplinary engagements that are now coming into the foray when it comes to looking at issues of extreme heat. So we have nutritionists on board, physiologists on board, epidemiologists on board. So how do you take this notion of a synemic, which is essentially about how, you know, why is it that certain kinds of diseases are produced in clusters vis-a-vis certain kinds of populations? So there is a social structural aspect to that. So how do you take the water pathway as a systemic in thinking about um the you know the issue of uh or the the dynamics of malnutrition in in relation to extreme heat and mobility and lactating women, uh, childcare, uh in Pakistan stunting is a huge issue. It's a massive issue. I think Pakistan is like uh in the top five countries in the world when it comes to malnutrition and stunting issues. So these become, so these kinds of engagements uh become very important, not only from a scholarly perspective, but also from a policy angle, right? So, how do we then, when we look at the youth and we look at children, then how can we inform, uh, how can we generate data from the ground up that really then brings on a transdisciplinary dimension when we start taking up the youth and the children, you know, question. And of course, there is the political aspect of it also through different participatory engagements, through films. So we actually, in our displacement project uh that was funded by IDRC, uh, we worked with the media component of Slum Dwellers in International with James Taylor, if anyone knows him. He does brilliant work filmmaking for the SDI lot. And we have a film that's actually wrapping up now, which has been in production for for the last three and a half years, and it took on the youth in Karachi who were actually resisting the entire evictions and displacement aspect uh back in 2020, 2021, and uh positioning them at the forefront of the different kinds of resistance campaigns that they were involved in and really giving them a voice. Uh, so once that film is finalized, which it will be very, very soon, it's been three and a half years in the making. Hopefully, for us at the Karajevin lab, that's very one important way of sort of getting popular you know methodologies going through filmmaking uh to bring those kinds of voices to the forefront. So hopefully, fingers crossed, we will see that come to fruition very soon.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Excellent.

SPEAKER_03 36:39

Mona, the answer to the same question, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Yeah, I mean, uh I I I you could also perhaps pick up the issue around migration. I'm not sure because you talked about the large number of migrants. And I wonder, do they get involved in your work? How do you think about the migrants who will remain or maybe not, and how you fold them into what you're doing?

SPEAKER_01 36:57

Sure. So I think uh from the the beginning of the what we call the refugee crisis in Lebanon, because it was really like overnight, like within two, three months, that we had a massive influx of refugees, and it was lived as a uh as a crisis in the sense that the entire entire international human rights organizations arrived in Beirut and all the relief agencies were there. And so we were confronted with sort of this exceptional extra rule that was governing a different population that was living with us. And uh what I found surprising from the beginning, and that was really before the lab, was the way in which the governance of displacement had to be managed with this like very urgency, we need to create tents, we need to create housing. And uh you would tell people in UNHCR or in UN Habitat, but there's no there is nobody sleeping on the streets. Surely there's somewhere else. Why don't we see how people are fending for themselves? And this was quite sort of unacceptable for people who are used to doing relief and there's a set of principles that you're supposed to follow. Uh, what you have to understand is that between Lebanon and Syria, there's a very long old history of labor migration. And so those massive numbers are really, first and foremost, the families of the workers who followed the families. And if you begin to think about them that way, you find that it's a very different kind of very urban transformation that is happening, where neighborhoods that had housed workers for a very long time now had families. With sometimes positive surprises, because people in the neighborhoods were not complaining. They were saying the men were overwhelming in our area and they were creating street fights, and now we have families and children playing. It's a little bit better. But go convince UNHCR then to do a neighborhood upgrading strategy instead of building camps. It takes a lot of energy and work and trying to prove that. So it was a long conversation, and that got us to build a research project that we called refugees as city makers, in which we began to document ways in which the population transformation in the city was also changing the practices of city dwellers. So one of the projects I'll mention was mapping the work of young Syrian men who, weeks after arriving to Beirut, began to work as delivery drivers. So they would actually have motorcycles and they would work to deliver food in houses. And that really transformed people's practices in the city. Suddenly everyone was doing delivery food, and it wasn't so common before that. Um but what I found interesting is how do these guys know where to go? They just arrived to Beirut. And so we began to do all sorts of uh interviews asking them to map the city and uh and to tell us about ways in which they they know the city. And so, of course, they would say stuff like, I have a GPS in my head, and uh and that got us thinking a lot about like ways of orientation and playing with the phone. But they also, when we mapped, we so we interviewed about 50 delivery drivers, and when we mapped their practices, we found that although they had never lived, for example, in the Beirut of the Civil War, in driving around the city, they replicated the divisions of the Lebanese Civil War that had been over for like 20 years before they arrived. Because that's what we do. We are divided, and so they're part of that same story. And and so since then we've been doing several projects. My main interest has been in changing the conversation with which we talk about displacement. Um, it's very classed. Well-off Syrians live in Beirut downtown and have a house that I would never imagine I could ever even visit. Uh, so it's really about poverty, and so we're trying to work to reframe that question around issues of tenant versus landlord, and thinking about Lebanese tenants versus Syrian tenants versus Lebanese property owners, and how much the difference is bigger between homeowners and landlords and tenants versus refugees and Lebanese population. I can talk about this a lot, but a lot of the the a lot of what we try to do is then to nuance the way in which people perceive that displacement, knowing that while we're making a crisis out of displacement and imagining that huge influx of one group coming over the other, my city, Beirut, had only 4,000 people back in 1840 when the first refugee crisis started. And Beirut is really a city that developed and grew because it was able to welcome over the years, before there was even a Lebanon, people that were forced out by violence from Mount Lebanon first, then from Syria, then from Palestine in 1948, before that from Armenia. So cities grow this way, and if we allow ourselves for a second to prevent populist movements from creating this migrant national division and that trap of imagining that it's all around the state, the dynamics are actually much more uh integrated and interesting. And I'll just say that we replicate those same silos in academia. So if you look at how force displacement is studied, it's usually in emergency humanities, there's a refugee studies discipline. And it's very problematic because actually, if you think more about it as an integrated displacement and you think of the conjunctural uh moment in which these forces overlap, you'll find way more things that are transforming because housing is financialized and the refugees arrived, then having someone study housing financialization and someone else study that. I mean, in in some ways.

SPEAKER_00 42:44

Um Nasheen just wanted to add something before. Yeah, very quickly on the migration aspect.

SPEAKER_03 42:48

So, you know, listening to Mona just now also reminded me that in the Pakistan context we have been host to well over a million Afghan refugees uh, you know, since since the Soviet invasion. And this entire situation has now turned around and become something very, very toxic. The Pakistani state is now expelling Afghans. And uh and in from cities like Karachi, from Lahore, to Kuerta, all over up north, uh in Peshawar and elsewhere, you know, these Afghan refugee, second, third generation populations have become a very important part of the urban economy of the broader urban palmsets. And now families are being torn apart, children being torn apart from you know from their families. It's been this has been happening now for over a slightly over a year. So uh so in any given moment in time, uh people who were at first embraced now have become criminals and encroachers, and it's it's actually quite shocking to see how fast the discourse changes because the local economy shifts in the region. And uh so yeah, I mean it's this is a very, very toxic and a very, very painful moment.

SPEAKER_00 43:50

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 43:51

Well, one of the things that that strikes me is say we looked at a list of the kinds of topics that we've talked about today, like climate change, heat, rental markets. Vacancies, housing, young people, migration, the challenges of interdisciplinarity. You know, you find those kinds of lists on the priority of many different urban research centres. It's kind of familiar at that level. But then it's so incomprehensible at another level in terms of the kind of struggles that you face as individual researchers and the context in which you find yourself. And I just want a penultimate question before handing back to Tom, really about then the kinds of global politics of knowledge production, because you mentioned about the secrecy of some of what you need to do, the need to keep a lot of things under the radar, but you're still within these systems of knowledge capitalism that you need to publish in order to get funding. And at the same time, it raises another question I just want you to reflect on, which is like, what is the role of the kind of international allies, international partners, in the kinds of solidarities that you might need to do this work?

SPEAKER_03 44:49

Allow me to go first one. Yeah, you know, international partners, global partners, very, very important. Um, you know, I've been very, very lucky, I've been very fortunate that in terms of all the projects that uh that I, my colleagues and I have worked on over the last decade, if not over a decade now, in collaboration with with colleagues over in the United States, in Canada, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, even in India, you know, I think of the Hyderabad Urban Lab, Alookhandekar, Anand Mai Gandhi, uh, you know, amazing, amazing people. Um, the the hope really comes from from knowing that there are like-minded individuals, stationed, positioned in institutions that are small and large and across the globe, uh, and that you can in any given moment in time come together, not just to collaborate for grants, but just to maybe write something that is, that creates a space of hope. I know that is such a lousy way to say it, and there's so much criticism about this notion of hope. But maybe something that aligns our politics in this moment of crisis, you know, which is a chronic condition, thinking of Laurent Ballon's work. And it's like a miasma, it's like an illness. So when the war was going on between India and Pakistan, you know, it was like, when is this going to end? It's just gone on forever. So in those moments, uh, there is some clarity in knowing that you can stretch your mind and your your hand to find these kinds of collaborations that then really do trigger um you know ways of doing, of thinking, of creating a new kind of uh, you know, for an epistemology of of um of knowledge generation, and that gives credence to to the idea that data production makes sense in in all its different forms. So I'm very grateful and I feel very privileged and very lucky to have had a wonderful set of colleagues to work with across these different lead uh regions and that these collaborations continue to grow.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

If I can just add before you uh uh respond, Monachine mentioned hope there and said a bit about that. If you could also tell us, as you wrap up, a bit more about where you find space for optimism in your work, um, whether or not that's to do with the international partners. So just two questions to finish with.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

I'll be brief if it's about hope. Uh no, I think that one of the things that has been the most rewarding is actually being asked by uh younger scholars in Syria, in Jordan, and in Palestine about how can we start a similar lab in our cities? Can you help us? And uh for me, that's one place that's very meaningful. The other place that's very, very meaningful is getting every year hundreds of applications from young people who want to do an internship in the lab. And in the beginning it was a few students from Lebanese universities, now we get them from all over the place. Uh, people wanting to try uh to be part of what we're trying to, what we're trying to do. So that gives me a sense that even if we're not changing the militarized reality of our word, we are able to create a space of uh aspirational space and that there's a lot of echo in what we're doing among younger people. Uh, and that does give me hope, uh, definitely. Um, do colleagues in other universities give me hope? Um, I've had faith, there's definitely a great space in sometimes picking a piece and reading something and feeling someone else is in the same place and having that conversation and being able to build a project. And these are incredibly happy moments. At the same time, I have to say that I anytime we're in a in a big conference, particularly in the last two years, it is very isolating. You do feel that the moment you're gonna bring about Gaza, people are gonna feel scared that their government's gonna say something, that um you're they're gonna become under a negative eye, that you're bringing your own issues on them, and you you're constantly negotiating the fact that this is a very big deal. There is a genocide that is televised, and we are watching it, and we are not saying anything, and it cannot be silent because if we accept this, then we are not uh we are giving up the most important thing we were able to establish actually as human beings in the last hundred years at least or longer. So I feel that this has been an incredibly hard thing to actually negotiate in the last two years and quite a disincentive to even travel in general.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

No, I'm really I mean it's it's incredibly important that you you mentioned that um rather than you know us ending on perhaps a false note of optimism, although there are obviously spaces, and you've really highlighted the importance of working, particularly regionally, and building the next generation of people who will continue this work in contexts that are so troubled by violence for so long.

SPEAKER_02 49:54

Can we just give a round of the approach?

SPEAKER_00 49:55

Yeah, we'll have a big round of applause.

SPEAKER_02 50:08

So we hope you got as much out of that as we did. It was really sobering, and I know we have this conversation at the end, Tom, about optimism and whether there are spaces for hope. Yet the women themselves are so seriously impressive and powerful in everything that they say that there is hope in that alone. It really made me think, though, about the kind of relative contexts in which we do our work. How could you not? You know, when you hear about people doing research with drones going over their heads and surveillance cameras or being stopped by the military, these kinds of questions of secrecy and what needs to remain under the radar, off the radar, in order to do research really puts into context the some of the challenges that we face, for instance, in UK higher education. And I think it speaks to the really big point about the global politics of knowledge production. I've done some work on allyship and solidarities and activism before, but we really re- need to rethink how urban research labs around the world collaborate, how we create different networks of solidarity and how we care for each other under very difficult circumstances. That's certainly something that I'm taking from this conversation and will continue to think about for the rest of this year as the UI sort of concludes its 10-year anniversary.

SPEAKER_00 51:20

As they were speaking, the the contrast between the two jumped out at me. We talked about this a bit because they're both working in these militarized, conflict-affected environments. But the the difference between the Karachi situation of this overbearing state surveillance and control and the difficulty of doing that work, you know, it's quite different from in the Beirut case, where really they're building this data commons partly because there is no state, there is no data, and someone needs to do it. So there are the similarities, but also those contrasts. And I mean to just briefly reflect on a few of the the substantive issues that they they're most concerned with in each case. So obviously Noxhin has done a lot of work on climate change and heat. And we've had this workshop with other people from different parts of the world recently, including Brazil. And I was really struck as one of our Brazilian guests was talking about fears of insecurity in cities that led to children and other people often being locked in their own houses all day because of fears about their security and how that combines with extreme heat. And I think around the world we're seeing new forms of forced immobility, whether it's because of climate issues, whether it's because of security issues, whether it's simply because of poverty or exclusion, and how that combines with heat is quite an alarming urban challenge, I think. And then in the case of Beirut, I mean, some of the work that they've really pioneered has been around property and land and what's happening in spaces of conflict. But it's this idea that what looks like disinvestment and destruction in the city is also often a space of massive investment and speculation. So when you read the city, what looks like investment or disinvestment doesn't actually correspond to what the capital is doing. There's another story going on underneath that's all about different forms of speculation and extraction.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

And whilst doing all of that, of course, both professors are also engaging in the labour of academia. You know, there's this kind of the hidden labour of care negotiations, of difficult decisions in the midst of all of this about how to survive, how to support the next generation of researchers.

SPEAKER_00 53:18

It is hard to imagine when we're all worried about um, you know, our colleagues and careers and people are concerned with precarity in the academic sector in this country to think about trying to foster and nurture a centre of earlier career researchers and give them hope and a sense of a career when you're operating in those conditions of such uncertainty.

SPEAKER_02 53:38

So we do recommend you follow the Beirut Urban Lab, Karachi Urban Lab, visit the websites, find out what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

And most of the stuff they do is out there, open access, that's the other thing. There's loads of data and analysis.

SPEAKER_02 53:50

Absolutely. So we should wrap up here. I just want to thank uh our podcast assistants who did some research for us and helped us very much with the kind of live recording, Polly and Rhea.

SPEAKER_00 53:59

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 54:00

Tune in again next time, and we will be back soon.