Karachi headquarters office of Emaar, a Dubai-based real estate company [Photos Sehba Sarwar]

At a March 2009 ceremony in Houston, Mayor Bill White and Syed Mustafa Kamal, the mayor of Karachi, Pakistan, declared the two cities sisters. The connection between the two cities was not new to me. Back in 1992, when I followed my then-boyfriend-now-husband René to Houston, I remember absorbing concrete sprawls of apartment complexes, and thinking of Karachi, my home city. Since then, over the years, I’ve been writing and exploring the multiple parallels between Karachi, where I return often, and Houston, where I’ve been based for some time.

With a population of 16 million, Karachi is four times as dense as Houston. Most of the city is concrete, with open trash and few trees. But much like Houston, there is richness to be uncovered. Close to the seawall stands the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture built from sandstone structures recovered from the city center, and in the old city center is Khajoor Bazaar with open lanes stacked with chest-high mounds of fresh dates. Similarly, I had to immerse myself in Houston for a while before uncovering spaces such as the Menil Collection and surrounding neighborhood, the winding walk along Buffalo Bayou, and the drive down the sun-speckled section of Main Street parallel to Rice.

Both cities have quirks. In Karachi, donkey carts trot alongside decorated trucks and buses, while goats nibble on rotting fruit at busy street corners. In Houston, police officers often patrol on horseback, and, on 288 South, cattle graze in fenced fields minutes away from the Medical Center.

Ultimately, these are surface similarities. The March 2009 declaration of Karachi and Houston as sister cities made note of commercial and industrial ties. For me, the cities are intertwined through their mutual ethnic and race conflicts and demolished historic spaces.

During the 1800s, Karachi was a spacious and sleepy fishing village, but that changed a century later once the British began to use the city as a seaport. In 1947, after Partition, Karachi emerged as Pakistan’s capital, and its population exploded to accommodate muhajirs (immigrants) from north India who took over the country’s industrial sector. The mix of local population with newcomers has been violent—during the nineties, a civil war erupted in the city as indigenous Sindhis tried to reclaim the power they lost to muhajirs. Today, though Karachi hasn’t been the capital since the sixties, more ethnic groups continue to pour into the city. Currently, most of the violence has subsided, but tensions continue to simmer, given the turbulence in northern Pakistan.

Houston is also a young city. As its demographics shift and change, it too has experienced racial tension at different points in its history. During the sixties, in Houston as in the rest of the US, blacks fought hard in the desegregation movement. A decade later during the late seventies, many Chicano/as expressed rage at racial discrimination through the Moody Park protests. Currently, more than 60 percent of Houston’s population consists of communities of color. Many from this population are successful, but school dropout and incarceration rates are disproportionately high. Additionally, housing and “redevelopment” are daily battles in which citizens of color engage: historic black neighborhoods such as Freedmanstown and the Third Ward have changed radically with the explosion of real estate development by companies that tear down old structures to build new townhomes; the Eastside struggles to hold on to its Chicano/a roots as it gets ready to embrace a growth spurt; and southwest Houston, one of city’s most dense areas, is filled with immigrants from around the world who fight for basic amenities.

In Kamal’s flashy presentation at the DeLange Conference at Rice University back in March, he marketed Karachi as “secure,” poised to become a great international city on par with Singapore. He boasted of major infrastructure development: “60,000,000 gallon water treatment plant, a 582 km long water distribution network, a 621 km long sewerage disposal network, 150 pedestrian bridges, 200 prefabricated bus stops, Signal Free Corridor 1 [a 13 km freeway], Signal Free Corridor 2 [a 22 km freeway], and a 5 km bridge.” His presentation was dotted with smiling images of himself at ribbon-cutting ceremonies. There was no mention of citizens displaced by major reconstruction, mangrove habitats torn down for roads, or of businesses affected in low-income neighborhoods. Nor was there any reference to Kamal’s political allegiance to MQM, the muhajir group that led Karachi’s conflict during the nineties.

Meanwhile, much in the way that history gets erased in Houston, in Karachi, historic buildings continue to be replaced with cheap structures. And areas where fishing villages have stood for centuries are being sold off to companies such as Dubai-based Emaar (one of the world’s largest global real estate companies), with the goal of creating a seaside resort. Once the resort is completed, people will no longer be able ride public buses to Hawkesbay or Sandspit beaches—that are located at the same distance from Karachi’s city center as Galveston is from Houston.

Clifton Seawall at sunset, Krachi, Pakistan. Photo by Sehba Sarwar.

Often when people ask me why I live in Houston, I tell them: “I live here because it’s like Karachi: hot, polluted, and there’s no respect for history.” As an artist and community organizer, I continue to connect local struggles taking place on opposite sides of the world. While I’m glad that my two homes are now officially linked, my voice in both cities continues to be one of reflection and protest, seeking to capture histories that are slowly eroding.

Sehba Sarwar is a novelist, and multidisciplinary artist. She serves as the Founding Director for Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB). For more information, visit her website at www.sehbasarwar.net. The next VBB event, Living Room Art: Honoring Dissent / Descent, will be held November 7, 2009 at her home.

KCS Red on Green, Oil on Masonite [David Cobb]

If you are intrigued by David Cobb’s art and reflections on rail, industry, and culture, check out the Cite Infrastructure Issue.

I began painting the railcars or “rolling stock” back in my college years at the University of Houston as a project for my undergraduate studies. I was helping my father, Tom Cobb, digitize his extensive collection of slides he’d taken of the Southern Pacific railroad, mainly from the 1970′s and 80′s. As we scanned and doctored images I became enthralled with the photos of boxcars. Simple, utilitarian, industrial, vital, yet so commonplace they seem to go unnoticed. I was hooked. It was time to honor the boxcar. The idea of using the rolling stock as my reference for the modern day railway instead of the typical grandiose depiction of a steam engine or diesel locomotive muscling its way through an open landscape seemed to been more honest.

So from there I began shooting my own photos of railcars not knowing exactly where I was headed with it. I began photographing in local railyards and down around the petro chemical areas on the port and Pasadena refineries, eventually making my way to Galveston where I discovered a little railyard free of hassle. As I looked at the images it was the layering of graffiti over the structural elements of the boxcars that really stood out. So I began cropping the photos to include the details around the door areas where the combination of structural and mechanical elements painted over with graffiti was the most complex. It is from these images that I create my paintings.

One of the interesting things I’ve discovered was found looking into the history of railcar graffiti. Their are some very well known monikers (usually simple images drawn with a white paint stick) including Bozo Texino, Herby, and The Colossus of Roads that still exist on cars today and are being preserved by a small following. They call themselves rebuilders due to their practice of tracing over the old drawings to keep them alive. I wonder how many of today’s graffiti artists will be given the same respect.

The hardest part of my paintings was recreating the organic nature and vibrant color of the modern graffiti artist. The folklore that I have unravelled has actually, in a way, uncovered one of my significant relationships to the images. The monikers or chalk drawings were thought to be used by the hobo community to communicate location and travels on the rail when in actuality most of them drew, and drew religiously, to be recognized and remembered. The same is true of the artists that cover the cars today. And so it seems I too am using the railway format to create my own legacy.

Midland Valve

Camel Brand

Cotton Belt

Galveston Yard

KCS Blue on Blue

Red Plug Door

David Cobb was born September 1981 in Houston, TX. He completed a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting at the University of Houston in 2005. His work has been shown at Talento Bilingue de Houston and Lawndale.

Sketch of Lars Lerup [From a celebration announcement, unknown artist]

Stephen Fox delivered the following valedictory on Tuesday May 19, 2009, at a reception in celebration of Lars Lerup’s 16 years of leadership and service as dean of the Rice School of Architecture (RSA). For background, you can read this previous OffCite post, this profile of Lerup in Rice News, and the announcement of John Casbarian as the new RSA dean through the end of the calendar year.

It is with profound gratitude that we gather to pay tribute to Lars Lerup and acknowledge his leadership as dean of the school of architecture since 1993.

In a lineage of distinguished leaders—from William Ward Watkin, the founder and for forty years the chair of the Rice Institute’s architecture department, to the maverick Donald Barthelme, to William W. Caudill, who reinvented the department as the school of architecture, to Anderson Todd, to David Crane, the first dean of architecture and his director Alan Y. Taniguchi, to O. Jack Mitchell and Peter G. Rowe, to Paul Kennon and Alan Balfour, and to Lars Lerup with John J. Casbarian—Rice’s School of Architecture has consistently ranked at the forefront of architectural education in the United States, despite its small enrollment and a geographical location that, in terms of certain metropolitan prejudices, is sometimes accounted marginal.

Lars Lerup has sustained this tradition of excellence with brilliance. He has achieved this distinction by embodying the aphorism with which René Descartes sparked the Enlightenment: Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am.

Having known Lars since he first began to teach at Rice in 1983, I have observed his passion for thinking as a critical method for formulating ideas. I purposefully use the gerund form here—thinking, formulating—because for Lars critical inquiry is a continuous and endlessly stimulating process and practice. At the academic festival organized this past March to celebrate his tenure, Lars intensely engaged each of the presenters. One sensed, over and over again, the intellectual keenness and liveliness on which he thrives—and which, as a teacher, he imparts to all around him. I’ve accused Lars of practicing the intellectual equivalent of shock therapy on students, faculty colleagues, anyone he can get his hands on once he’s had an idea and wants to talk about it. As a result, in the corridors of Anderson Hall, the phrase “life of the mind” is not merely a cliché. It describes a vivid, on-going process of spontaneous intellectual exchange—of questioning, deducing, hypothesizing—that is the basis of the mental-emotional exercise process we call education.

Architecture schools are frequently criticized for being academies: remote, abstract, out of touch with the real world of practice and practicality. Yet as educational institutions, architecture schools have to inculcate skills and knowledge that will outlast the rapid pace of technical obsolescence that has characterized the architecture profession during the past half-century. The ability to rationally evaluate, criticize, and formulate ideas—and the cultural refinement that endows this process with depth, reflection, and responsibility—depends on knowledge and skills that academies are especially well positioned to provide. Lars Lerup stands out as a teacher—in Greek a doctor, in Hebrew a rabbi—because he lives to think and he takes such evident and generous pleasure in sharing this attribute with all those who are around him.

Leadership, as all leaders know, is a collective enterprise. I want to take this occasion to acknowledge the dedication and diligence of John Casbarian, a distinguished Houston architect, as associate dean of the school of architecture, aided by Doris Anderson, Kent Fitzsimmons, Kathleen Roberts, Mildred Crocker, Susan Guidry, Diania Williams, Hans Krause, Chad Loucks, and Izabel Gass. The school’s exceptional faculty brings a wide range of professional talents and scholarly aptitude to their teaching. Professors William T. Cannady, Gordon Wittenberg, Albert Pope, and Carlos Jiménez; Associate Professors Spencer Parsons, Farès El-Dahdah, Dawn Finley, and Christopher Hight; Assistant Professor Neyran Turan; Professors in Practice Nonya Grenader, Douglas Oliver, and Nana Last; Lecturers Tom Lord, Frank White, Jim Furr, Alan Fleishacker, Rives Taylor, Christof Spieler, Michael Robinson, and Joe Powell; Visiting Professors Danny Samuels, Mark Wamble, Michael Morrow, Blair Satterfield, Eva Franch Gilabert, Troy Schaum, Larry Albert, Kerry Whitehead, and Mary Ellen Carroll; and our revered Professors Emeritus Elinor Evans and Anderson Todd illuminate Rice’s School of Architecture. The Rice Design Alliance bridges between town and gown to serve as the platform for constructing a civic culture of architecture in Houston.

Lest we be tempted to underestimate the power of intellectual leadership, I remind you of the inscription, mortared into place ninety-eight years ago by William Ward Watkin at the base of Lovett Hall:

Democritus said: Rather would I discover the cause of one fact than be king of all the Persians.

Far from being ephemeral, ideas are the cornerstone on which the most magnificent and enduring works of architecture are founded. Lars Lerup understands this and he has dedicated his life as a teacher of architecture to the propagation of ideas.

Lars’s next posting, at the American Academy in Rome, where he will be the Arnold W. Brunner Fellow in Architecture for 2009-2010, affords me the opportunity to conclude this valedictory with a proper Roman salute:

Lars Lerup: ave atque vale: hail and—for the time being—farewell.