SMOKERS’ CORNER: LAHORE VS KARACHI

The tiresome and perpetually ill-informed debate regarding the supposed superiority of Lahore over Karachi manifests with regularity across social media. It is contested as if it were a zero-sum existentialist struggle.

The discourse is often stripped of nuance and weaponised for partisan gain. The noted architect and researcher Arif Hasan once told me that cities really cannot be compared. He argued that every urban sprawl possesses its own unique geographical, historical and demographic characteristics.

This sentiment was reinforced by a city planner in Chicago whom I met last year for a research project. He also echoed the views of the political scientist Carlo Epifanio. To Epifanio, the practice of ranking cities frequently suffers from methodological biases and a failure to account for local context.

Researchers such as Perrine Hamel and urban planner Devansh Jain have pointed out that such rankings often lack quality data for cities in the Global South. Rankings mostly rely on indicators that disproportionately favour cities in the Global North. Therefore, the rankings fail to reflect the specific developmental challenges, economic realities and historical trajectories faced by different regions. Attempting to measure urban centres against one another is akin to comparing apples and oranges. Both are fruits, yet they possess entirely different properties and requirements for growth.

Karachi and Lahore are products of distinct histories and environments. Treating them as ‘rivals’ obscures the challenges facing both and reduces serious questions of governance to partisan spectacle

The same fallacy applies to the perennial comparison between Karachi and Lahore. This is typically perpetuated by those who view cities as static monoliths rather than multifaceted, living organisms.

According to a 2019 International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, even within a single country under a unified political framework, cities function as distinct environments, where regional nuances make the act of direct, top-down comparisons inherently misleading. A city’s evolution is dictated by its historical progression. Geography plays a critical role as well, particularly the distinction between coastal access and landlocked terrain.

Karachi is a relatively recent city defined by its bustling port, having evolved under British occupation from a modest fishing town in the early 19th century into a major urban centre by the 1940s. Lahore, on the other hand, is an ancient, landlocked city.

According to the historian Carola Hein, coastal/port cities are defined by their position at the intersection of land and sea, making them “nodes of movement and transition.” This shapes a ‘maritime mindset’, reflecting an innate openness to external influences, cultural diversity, migration and trade.

A study by the urban planner Vincent Baptist and geographer Francesca Savoldi noted that, because port cities exist at the precarious edge of water and land, they face constant environmental pressures, fostering a resilient and adaptive disposition among their residents. Rainfall in Karachi is erratic from one monsoon season to the other, and there is always the potential of violent sea storms. It has a semi-arid climate. It also holds the largest population in the country.

On the other side is the concept of the ‘landlocked mindset.’ Urban studies define it as an emphasis on territorial integrity, stability and historical continuity. In landlocked cities such as Lahore, the absence of an open maritime horizon turns the gaze of residents inward.

As the American political geographer Steve Hess suggests, in a landlocked city, identity is frequently tied to the fixity of architecture and the preservation of cultural homogeneity. Since the city cannot expand toward an open sea, it grows by layering its development over its own past.

The sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone notes that, in many landlocked cities of the Global South such as Lahore, social survival depends on the density of local interpersonal relationships and the maintenance of traditional neighbourhood structures or mohallahs. This is common in Lahore.

When a television anchor from Punjab recently suggested that no Sindh minister could stand in Lahore and claim that they can successfully turn it into Karachi, he was technically correct. The geography, historical development and underlying mindsets of both cities are uniquely and irreconcilably different.

But he didn’t mean it in this way. He was merely mouthing a not-very-informed, populist opinion. The truth is, whereas a person with a maritime mindset is often capable of understanding the nuances of Lahore, the landlocked mindset frequently struggles to fully grasp the complex, chaotic and diverse nature of Karachi.

Nevertheless, the obsession with comparison is mostly played out as a distraction from governance issues that plague both metropolises. By focusing on competitive rhetoric, citizens and policymakers alike neglect the site-specific interventions required for development.

Sound practice dictates that infrastructural improvement projects should be conceptualised according to the specific historical, environmental and geophysical features of a city. As the Chicago planner added, one can’t plan to improve the infrastructure of New York with a plan shaped

for Dallas. Appreciating the social make-up of Lahore rooted in rich history, or the diversity and cosmopolitan resilience of Karachi, should not require the disparagement of the other.

Karachiites themselves have been critical of their own city governments, acknowledging compounding infrastructural issues. However, this is often exploited by political parties that treat the city as a punching bag. Ironically, this even includes parties whose main vote-bank is in Punjab.

Even the state has kicked in by using vloggers to regurgitate myopic narratives about Karachi to put pressure on whichever party is ruling it, especially the Pakistan Peoples Party. A recent ‘documentary’ in this regard that looked more like a caricature of an entirely unsubtle propaganda reel is a case in point. Yet, Karachi continues to accommodate tens of thousands of migrants annually and remains one of the country’s most open-minded urban centres.

The quality of the Karachi-Lahore debate is often silly, if not outright embarrassing. It resembles a viral video of a discussion someone posted on Facebook recently. In the clip, a journalist is interviewing a resident of Gilgit-Baltistan who is a staunch Imran Khan fan.

The journalist asks the resident what development projects the previous Khan government in the region had initiated. The resident insists there were many. The journalist asks him to name a few. The man replies, tourism. The next question is for him to name specific tourism projects. The resident answers that when Khan’s government was in charge, there was good snowfall on the mountains, which is good for tourism. Amused, the journalist asks if he is suggesting that the government created the snowfall. The reply is a sincere “Yes”.

I have used this specific example to demonstrate how the political nature of the Karachi-Lahore debate has been reduced to this level of absurdity, where people are even willing to conflate natural phenomena with political governance, utterly ignoring the reality of the spaces they inhabit.

Published in Dawn, EOS, June 14th, 2026