Embodied, Salvaged, Reused: The Inadvertent Trajectories of Patching, Unpatching, and Repatching Carbon in Low-Income Housing Construction Practices in Karachi

Abstract:

This article conceptualizes everyday processes of carbon embodiment and transplantation in informal settlements across Karachi, Pakistan. The authors explore these grounded carbon trajectories against the state’s carbon discourses and policies, highlighting the lacunae in the national (de)carbonization discourse particularly in the housing construction sector.

In contrast, they look at grounded, unintended, and ad hoc practices of carbon embodiment and transplantation through the lens of the informal housing construction sector in urban Pakistan, drawing on several representative cases from extended fieldwork in Karachi during 2018–22. They examine how carbon is embodied and “transplanted” across spatial regions, intergenerational life courses, and the localized imaginaries of urban housing, through the everyday practices of residents (de/re)constructing and living in informal, patchworked houses. Against the backdrop of Karachi’s housing precarity, Abudallah and Macktoom observe peculiar temporal-material patterns that frame everyday carbon management for a large proportion of urban dwellers. They conceptually weave these cases together to speculate on patchwork housing processes, material redistributive practices, and carbon (dis)embodiment for populations lying beyond the state’s formal attempts at de-carbonization. They posit that understanding, accounting for, and upscaling the existing practices of patching, unpatching, and repatching carbon constitutes a critical lens to understand the smaller-scale yet more proximate and intense relations of carbon in under-documented cities like Karachi.