SMOKERS’ CORNER: LAHORE VS KARACHI

Illustration by Abro 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 environment