'Pandemic has brought marginalised communities to centre stage'.

Byline: Peerzada Salman

KARACHI -- Three more eminent speakers shed light on 'Climate change, cities and violence in the time of Covid-19: perspectives from South Asia' on the second day of the workshop organised online by The Climate Change and Urban Violence Global EngAaAgAement NetAwork (CCUVN) at the InstAitute of Business AdminAistration (IBA).

Dr Danesh Jayatilaka, chairman of the Centre for Migration Research and Development, Colombo was the first to address the participants.

His topic was underserved communities in Colombo and issues of relocating them. Referring to a project that he undertook, he said Colombo was the commercial capital of Sri Lanka; it's a modern city, with a population of seven to eight hundred thousand. There were clusters of underserved communities, over a thousand or more but his research was in particular about communities that were affected by floods.

Most of them had migrated to Colombo from rural areas, from upcountry. Some had come for safety, some for employment, some for education, etc.

The rural-urban migration had been taking place since colonial times. The study looked at why these people were attached to the locations they came to.

Dr Jayatilaka said it was found that housing and employment were main attractions because the spots where they settled were close to employment places and transport facilities. Relational aspect was also factored in.

It was a plus because migrants and informal workers used a lot of social networks to connect and be attached to each other. The negative component of the model was unhappiness in the shape of shame, because these places had crime, drugs and gangsters. So they were concerned about their children, about their own safety. As a result, there was a tension between what was materially there and the negative aspect of it.

This sort of complexity, whether you want to stay or leave as resettling was taking place, raised the question regarding difficulty of how to address it. He added there were projects happening in Colombo and investments coming in; some of these projects are better than others.

Fatima Tassadiq, doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a presentation on the impact of Orange Line metro train on local communities in Lahore, particularly looking at the neighbourhood of Kapurthala House and old...

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