Inhabiting Flyover Geographies: Flows, Interstices, and Walking Bodies in Karachi

Abstract

Flyovers have featured in critical urban planning scholarship in the Global South as fetishized symbols of modernity, often fragmenting urban environments, fracturing space, exacerbating inequalities, and embodying “worlding”’ aspirations of city planners. Acknowledging the role of such infrastructure as technologies of (dis)connection in increasingly enclaved cities, I seek to situate the flyover, its material form, and attendant gaps, characterized by raised ribbons of “smooth” flows, leftover spaces, and proliferation of informal practices, as important sites of encounters. As such, I take “borderland urbanism” as an impetus to think flyover geographies anew by locating the flyover as a particular place in the city that is transient, contested, and constantly re-made. Through ethnographic vignettes and interviews, I sketch out everyday urban experiences over and under a flyover in Karachi, Pakistan. I illustrate how the flyover as a spatial and temporal leap is perceived and experienced by a range of differently mobile urban dwellers, paying particular attention to how walking bodies inhabit an infrastructural landscape that heavily privileges cars and motorcycles. Furthermore, I trace how life in the interstices under the flyover is assembled through social collaboration, resisting eviction, and a politics of visibility.