Karachi Cartography
Description:
Karachi is projected to be submerged in water by 2060, as also evidenced by the annual glimpses of this during the monsoon season. The infrastructural mayhem continues to increase vulnerabilities. Karachi Cartography aims to rethink and redesign the city for resilience and adaptation. Doing so without a comprehensive understanding of the past, present, and potential precarity will only exacerbate dysfunctionality. The “Phase 1: Cartographic Analysis” involves mapping the heavily undocumented city, with a focus on water systems. Karachi Cartography’s founder, Namra Khalid, has recently received the Young Climate Visionary Prize by the World Around, partnered with Meta, and presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Founder:
Namra Kahlid - Founder & Director
Covalence Media:
We had the pleasure of interviewing Namra Khalid, Founder & Director of Karachi Cartography, about mitigating extreme weather in Karachi. Namra reflected on her childhood experiences living with floods, her educational background in design, and her two entrepreneurial endeavors: Karachi Cartography and Tabahi Naqsha, which work to create a more resilient Pakistan.
Listen to the podcast episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5U4AiPhAGdLsaChB3T4pfH?go=1&sp_cid=bd7893125730a9a668aa4201b4e64b79&nd=1&dlsi=87452e4e250c47f6
Namra Khalid is an architectural designer turned urban researcher and a positive change maker. Her work strives to create socio-climatic justice in the most vulnerable communities of Pakistan. She is the founder and director of Karachi Cartography (karachicartography.org), which aims to rethink the city for improved climate planning, adaptation, and resilience. Problem identification - mapping - is the essential first step in understanding what was, is, and can become. Hence she has initiated the work with cartographic analysis focused on water systems. For this, she was selected as one of the World Around's 25 under and 25 climate designers 2023. Among the 25 she was further awarded the Young Climate Visionary Prize, and presented her work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
She is also the co-founder of Tabahi Naqsha (website coming soon: TabahiNaqsha.pk), a real-time disaster information-sharing system in development, by CogniCity OSS. It aims to accelerate humanitarian response across Pakistan by harnessing the power of crowdsourcing through social media.
