This paper is interested in the connection between the urban imaginary – what Italo Calvino describes as a city’s “mirror image” in Invisible Cities – and urban experience, especially in the case of violent cities. The paper traces theoretical understandings of the urban imaginary, drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s construction of ‘monumentality’, Alev Cinar and Thomas Bender’s notion of imagined environments, and Leslie Sklair’s reading of iconicity. The paper interrogates the concept of the urban imaginary and tries to locate it, whether in media representations, Lefebvre’s monuments, or in what Michel de Certeau describes as the ‘tactics’ that comprise everyday practice.
Using Karachi, Pakistan, as a case study, the paper analyzes whether it is possible and what it means for a city to lack an urban imaginary. Karachi’s struggle to achieve iconicity or a consensual urban imaginary is traced through both a historical lens and a sociological perspective. By revisiting the history of Karachi’s post-Partition development, the paper argues that an urban imaginary might be connected to urban planning and policy. The city has failed to create a single institutional body in charge of urban planning and policy and has yet to adopt a coherent master plan that dictates a vision for the city’s growth. How this planning, policy, and post-colonial history impacts media representations of the city as well the built environment is considered as a reflection of an urban imaginary in crisis.
The paper then asks whether Karachi’s failure to articulate a consensual urban imaginary is related to the fact that the city is violent. Do violent cities replace urban imaginaries with ruptured realities? Or is a city’s violent reality subsumed within an urban imaginary that offers a space in which to craft an ethical response to violence?