Abstract
Why are maps important? Who should map? How are maps used? This paper addresses these questions using the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Karachi, Pakistan, as a case study in community-based mapping and environmental health. What is the relationship between community mapping processes, environmental literacy, and sustainable infrastructure in Orangi? The urban landscape in Karachi is characterized by rampant informality. As a result of high rates of rural-to-urban migration and an acute shortage of housing, high-density informal settlements, or katchi abadis, crowd the city. Many of these katchi abadis are not recognized by government agencies, and have no formal connections to existing water, sanitation, and health services. When initiating urban development projects, planning agencies in Karachi use outdated maps and only focus on formal communities and regularized informal settlements. Environmental health in these informal communities is thus dismal. The OPP was started in 1980 by Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan, a Pakistani social scientist and development practitioner, to improve living conditions for residents in Orangi, a katchi abadi in northwest Karachi. As part of its low-cost sanitation program, the OPP provides technical assistance to Orangi residents to help them build secondary sewer lines and latrines. One of the key contributions of the OPP, this paper argues, is the systematic surveying and community-based mapping of sewer lines in Orangi and in other informal settlements across Pakistan. The environmental literacy built in Orangi as a result of community mapping processes led to the community’s commitment to build, finance, and maintain sustainable infrastructure, and has thus improved environmental health. While the OPP model of community-driven, low-cost sanitation has achieved mixed results in replication, the organization’s detailed maps of informal, undocumented spaces have highlighted severe gaps in infrastructure in urban Pakistan and have spurred several communities to undertake their own community-based mapping approaches to improving environmental health. Environmental literacy, as created by community mapping processes, is key in the replication of the OPP model. Environmental literacy has two aspects – awareness of the community’s urban landscape on the part of an organization when designing and implementing environmental health interventions, and awareness of one’s lived experience in relationship to the environment on the part of residents. This paper ends with lessons for community mapping projects from the OPP case, and poses questions on the feasibility of community-based environmental health projects in weak and violent states.