The architect who documented Karachi’s forgotten settlements understood displacement from her own childhood. More than five decades after 1971, her story feels personal to me.
I Recognise Something in Her Story
When I read about Perween Rahman, I do not begin with Orangi.
I begin with 1971.
I am Bihari too. My family’s journey after 1971 was our own, but the larger history of displacement is familiar to me. Perween came from that history as well.
She was born in Dhaka in 1957. After the breakup of Pakistan in 1971, her family was displaced and eventually made its home in Karachi.
For families caught in that upheaval, 1971 was more than a date in a history book. A familiar street could suddenly lie in another country. Home could become something that depended on politics far beyond the control of the people living inside it.
Years later, Perween’s elder sister, Aquila Ismail, connected that experience with the woman her sister became. She recalled how deeply Perween reacted to people being evicted from their homes. Aquila believed their family’s own experience of dispossession had influenced her. Perween knew what losing a home meant.
That testimony changes how I look at her later work. Her maps were not simply drawings of Karachi. They were evidence that somebody belonged somewhere.
She Chose a Different Karachi
Perween studied architecture at Dawood College of Engineering and Technology and entered conventional architectural practice. She could have remained there.
Instead, she joined Akhtar Hameed Khan’s Orangi Pilot Project in 1982 and became closely involved with communities that conventional urban planning had often failed to serve.
Karachi was growing rapidly. Formal development could not keep pace with the settlements spreading across the city’s edges. Families often built their homes first and waited years for basic infrastructure.
The Orangi Pilot Project approached the problem from another direction. Instead of treating poorer communities simply as recipients of government development, OPP helped residents organise and finance low-cost sanitation within their neighbourhoods. Government agencies remained responsible for the larger external infrastructure.
Perween worked where those two Karachis met. An official plan might show a line. A family beside an open drain experienced something else entirely. She went to that Karachi.
The 334 Settlements Became Evidence
In 2004, OPP-RTI published Perween Rahman’s Katchi Abadis of Karachi: A Survey of 334 Katchi Abadis. The title sounds almost bureaucratic. The work was anything but trivial.
OPP had been documenting sewerage and water-supply lines in Karachi’s informal settlements for years. Its own publication record shows that the first volume covering 100 surveyed katchi abadis appeared in 2002. Perween’s survey of 334 settlements followed in 2004.
A settlement changes when someone documents it properly. Residents already know where their houses stand. Their neighbours know too. The problem begins when the official record tells a weaker story, or says almost nothing at all.
Mapping converts local knowledge into evidence. A drain can be located. Existing water infrastructure becomes visible on paper. The physical shape of a community can be compared with what government records claim is there.
Perween’s work later extended beyond the 334 katchi abadis. OPP documented Karachi’s goths as the expanding metropolis swallowed old villages and pushed up the value of their land. Documentation mattered because recognition could strengthen communities seeking regularisation or protection from displacement.
Here 1971 returns to my mind. Someone who has experienced displacement may understand particularly well the distance between saying this is my home and possessing evidence that institutions are forced to recognise.
Perween’s own sister saw a connection between the two experiences. For someone from the same wider history of displacement, that connection is difficult to ignore.
A Map Can Alter the Balance of Power
Maps look harmless. In Karachi, they can carry consequences.
Consider a settlement that has existed for decades while its legal status remains uncertain. The people living there know every lane. Government records may tell a different story.
Documentation narrows that gap. It establishes where people live and what already exists around them. Once that information enters the public record, competing claims can be tested against evidence rather than memory alone.
Perween’s work therefore went beyond architecture. It reduced invisibility. That matters in a city where land can become enormously valuable simply because Karachi has expanded around it.
The same principle applied to another resource that Karachi residents understand painfully well: water.
She Followed Karachi’s Water
I have lived in Karachi long enough to know the peculiar frustration of a city where a water pipeline can pass through an area without guaranteeing water to the people who live there.
Perween wanted to understand the system on the ground. Her research examined Karachi’s water supply and the illegal hydrants operating within it. OPP documentation from this period also dealt with the tanker economy and the diversion of water from the formal network.
The work matters because water scarcity in Karachi cannot always be understood by looking only at how much water enters the system. Distribution matters. So does control.
Mapping allows a researcher to ask a simple question that can become politically uncomfortable: if water enters this network but does not reach these households, where does it go?
Perween also worked on Karachi’s drainage system. OPP documented natural nalas and drainage channels while developing proposals for the city’s sewerage system.
The city began to look different on paper. Informal settlements could be located rather than dismissed as vague patches of urban poverty. Drainage routes became part of a larger system. Water infrastructure could be examined against what residents actually received.
Urban disorder started revealing an underlying structure. That structure inevitably raised questions about power.
When Mapping Collided With Powerful Interests
This part of Perween Rahman’s story requires care.
Her work touched land disputes and illegal water infrastructure. She also spoke publicly about land grabbing. OPP reported that she had received threats.
Investigators later examined different possible motives for her murder. A joint investigation team looked at possible connections involving militant actors and illegal water interests. Investigators also examined land-grabbing networks because OPP had been helping residents document settlements and establish claims over land.
One investigation ultimately advanced a land-related theory. But an investigative theory is not the same thing as a final judicial finding. That distinction matters.
On 13 March 2013, Perween was travelling home from the OPP office when gunmen attacked her vehicle on Manghopir Road. She was 56.
A woman who had spent decades documenting where other Karachi residents lived was killed on a road in her own city. The search for her killers then moved from Karachi’s streets into police files and courtrooms.
The Courts Did Not Give Karachi a Final Answer
The investigation lasted years. In December 2021, a Karachi anti-terrorism court convicted five men. Four received life sentences. The fifth was sentenced to seven years.
It appeared that the criminal case had finally produced an answer. It had not.
On 21 November 2022, the Sindh High Court overturned the convictions and acquitted all five men.
The legal distinction is important. The High Court observed that the accused had not been charged with personally carrying out Perween’s shooting. The prosecution case concerned planning and abetment.
The court concluded that the prosecution had failed to establish their involvement beyond reasonable doubt. It identified problems with important evidence and found that the defendants were entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
An acquittal has consequences for how this story should now be written. I cannot responsibly state that those five men murdered Perween Rahman.
Her family challenged the outcome. In December 2022, Aquila Ismail approached the Supreme Court against the acquittal of principal accused Abdul Raheem Swati. Her petition argued that the Sindh High Court had misread or failed to consider important evidence.
The legal aftermath became complicated. The Sindh government subsequently attempted to detain the five acquitted men under the Maintenance of Public Order framework. The Sindh High Court struck down that detention order as unlawful and directed police to continue providing protection to Aquila Ismail and OPP staff.
I have found reliable reporting confirming the Supreme Court appeal. I have not found an authoritative public record establishing a final Supreme Court judgment that resolves the central question.
For that reason, I will not fill the gap with an allegation. It remains a gap.
I Keep Coming Back to 1971
Perhaps this is why Perween’s story affects me differently.
I am Bihari.
I know 1971 through the history carried by families who had to begin again somewhere else. I do not claim that my family’s experience was identical to Perween’s. Displacement produces different stories even among people who come from the same historical rupture.
But one part of her story feels familiar: the uncertainty of home.
Perween’s sister remembered how strongly she reacted when other people faced eviction. That family testimony matters because it prevents me from imposing a convenient interpretation on her life decades later.
Her history gives her professional choices a different meaning. Perween did not give Karachi’s poor their homes. They had already built them. She helped produce evidence that those homes existed.
There is power in that distinction.
Karachi Still Has Her Maps
Karachi changes quickly. Buildings disappear. Settlements acquire different names. A neighbourhood that once stood at the city’s edge can find itself sitting on extremely valuable urban land a generation later.
Records matter in such a city. Perween understood this.
Her survey of 334 katchi abadis remains part of that documentary record. OPP continued documenting informal settlements beyond that original survey and developed maps of infrastructure that allowed conditions on the ground to be compared with official planning.
Perween spent years putting communities onto maps because documentation could turn existence into evidence.
For someone whose family had once experienced dispossession, that work carries a meaning I recognise.
Her maps remain.
Karachi can still see the lines she helped draw. What it cannot yet show with the same certainty is the final name of the person, or persons, legally responsible for killing her.
