Cultural investment

OVER the years, layers of decay have been piled on Karachi. Be it the built environment or the social sphere, the rot is pervasive. The city’s skyline is visually chaotic, mirroring a deep social fatigue. Yet beneath the corrosion lies a hunger for spaces alive with energy, for non-transactional encounters, and for a life that is more than survival. A significant reason for this state is the lack of sustained cultural and urban investment.

There is negligible increase in art and cultural funding that supports young, independent artists, musicians and multidisciplinary practitioners. The avenues for emerging creatives to experiment, produce and engage with the city are scant. This gap reflects that authorities see culture as expendable.

Globally, cultural funding works like investment in start-ups. It nurtures risk, innovation, and new forms of thinking, allowing individuals to test ideas, adapt, and contribute to a broader civic discourse. Regrettably, in Karachi cultural expression remains largely dependent on sporadic festivals, institutional programming and centralised platforms. These are spectacular but temporary, unable to sustain long-term engagement or cultivate grassroots ecosystems.

A city of over 20 million cannot depend on a singular narrative, or central body to define its cultural direction. It deserves many voices, centres and forms of expression. It is time to rethink how culture can be supported at the micro level. Perhaps, through investing in neighbourhood-based cultural infrastructures? Each locality could host its own small arts council, shaped by residents to showcase its histories as well as respond to the current context. Such a model decentralises cultural authority, making way for multiple cultural leaders.

It also offers a way out of reductive linguistic, ethnic and class-based binaries that often structure our cultural discourse. When neighbourhoods produce their own cultural programming, they generate infrastructures rooted in lived realities.

It is time to rethink how culture can be supported.

Public spaces have mostly been approached from an infrastructural viewpoint. This is necessary but incomplete. Why is creative practice not recognised as legitimate education that occurs in what urban theorists call ‘third spaces’? When spaces fail to host dialogue and creativity, the citizenry becomes disengaged. A city without a vibrant public life loses its capacity to think collectively, to question, to dream.

The Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s initiatives to activate Denso Hall, Frere Hall, Empress Market and Hoti Market show a recognition of the role heritage and culture play in public life. The adaptive reuse of historic buildings is encouraging, and deserves appreciation. But when the mayor chooses non-heritage experts, contractors and engineers who use sand-blasting as a form of preservation with AI images serving as the blueprint of an idea, conservation endeavours remain trapped in top-down bureaucratic frameworks. A transparent, participatory system for civic engagement is the solution.

Moreover, establishing a government public art fund to support grassroots initiatives should be considered. This will enable community curators, artists, and organisers to apply for resources to develop neighbourhood-based cultural programmes with specified multi-year commitments. The model will shift the focus from spectacle to sustainability, and from consumption to participation.

But what if institutional support does not materialise? What if cultural investment is not a priority for the rulers? In that case, we must devise alternative modes of cultural production that function outside formal structures.

We could start with the streets, the rooftops that overlook this restless skyline, front yards, corridors, etc, to shape daily life. Through this, a form of majlis will re-emerge as a new, uniting practice; a peaceful revolution of proximity.

In these gatherings, poems can be recited, films projected onto a white wall or a draped cloth, and new music can surface. Simple yet radical, these will rebuild the cultural muscle memory of Karachi. Although the need for institutional support is irreplaceable, such efforts will prove that culture is not entirely dependent on it, and that the city still has the capacity to self-organise for alternative futures.

Karachi can then become a living archive where fragments of connection drive change. A community-led cultural navigation is fluid, local and responsive. It rejects isolation. And micro-level togetherness infuses vitality.

Finally, what kind of a city do we want to invest in? One that merely exists or one that thinks and imagines? The answer will determine the future of Karachi’s spaces and people.

The writer is an architect.

X: @MarviMazhar

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2026

if you want to get more information about this news then click on below link

More Detail