With half of the world’s population now living in cities, urbanisation is driving human civilisation and has been the key driver of prosperity in the past two centuries. However, many new migrants to the city find that their aspirations take years or even decades to materialise. Worldwide, as in Pakistan, new rural-to-urban migrants often live in squalid transient settlements with limited opportunities and poor living conditions which they choose over worse poverty and lack of opportunity that they leave behind. Cities triumph through agglomerating people and ideas. However information asymmetry about opportunities and services limits this potential. We used crowd-sourcing in Dhok Hassu, Rawalpindi to map a population of 200,000. The Akhtar Hameed Khan Development Trust (AHKRC) and Research and Development Solutions (RADS) aim to facilitate development by connecting aspects of public and private sector opportunities by fostering an ongoing dialogue on urbanisation and to test innovations with scientifically robust methodologies. This is the first in a series of dialogues on urban issues that were identified during research and conversations in urban slums.
URL : 20170707014319.pdf