Quality of Life by Aneela Ali

Quality of Life
The term quality of life is used to evaluate the general well-being of individuals and societies.
The term is used in a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, and politics.
Quality of life should not be confused with the concept of standard of living, which is based primarily on income. Instead, standard indicators of the quality of life include not only wealth and employment, but also the built environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, and social belonging.
The survey uses nine quality of life factors to determine a nation's score.

Urban living ties the welfare of everyone with the well being of everybody else. The common refrain that we are our brothers’ (and sisters) keepers is particularly true in cities. The smoke belching auto rickshaws and cars pollute the air for all, whether one lives in Defence or Orangi in Karachi. Garbage from my house dumped in the street blows into my neighbours’ homes. Any person’s safety from crime cannot be separated from police protection for all others. Although we idealise villages as close knit communities, cities are where – without knowing each other – we are tied together in bonds of interdependence.

The health, safety and welfare of people in urban areas are indivisible. Whether a large metropolis like Karachi or a town such as Sehwan, all urban settlements depend on communal water supply, garbage disposal, drains or traffic laws, public health and other services for good living. Urban areas are communities of a different kind, impersonally and institutionally, rather than socially, bound together. Millions live linked with each other, yet are only vaguely aware of such bonds. Communal services tie together urban communities. They make them liveable.

A good city is not a forest of highrises, glittering malls and super highways, but a place where traffic is disciplined, public transport is plentiful, the environment healthful, air clean, schools good, economy healthy, housing adequate and people’s rights honoured. The basis of such a city is a regime of what economists call collective goods.

What are collective goods? Those goods, services and institutions that can only be consumed and produced for a community as a whole. They are indivisible and have externalities in that both negative and positive effects of their consumption filter out from a consumer to others and vice versa. They are not like food, clothes or houses, which can be appropriated by individuals and hence are private goods. Contrastingly, air quality is a pure collective goods, for example one person cannot have it without it being available to others in the same space.

Collective goods include both the physical facilities, such as roads, parks, water and sewerage, garbage disposal or national defence, and human services and institutions, such as traffic safety, property rights, police and judiciary, environmental protection, or good government. These are goods and services meant to be produced and consumed collectively. There are many more that over time have come to be considered collective goods essential for modern societies, such as universal education, immunisation, land use controls, building regulations, homeless shelters, day care and unemployment insurance.

Although individuals may directly benefit from some of these goods and services, their consumption by individuals contributes to a community’s quality of life. A literate person for example is not only more productive but also is able to read traffic notices and safety instructions and thus less of a hazard for others. Because of the concentration of people and activities, urban areas need large number of collective goods and new technologies continually expand the range of such goods.

Pakistan’s urban areas lack in collective goods necessary for a good quality of life. At the root of all collective goods in a city is the ‘rule of rules’, which Pakistani cities direly miss. A public spirited, neutral and efficient bureaucracy is the instrument of the rule of rules and the producer of collective goods. It is overseen by a representative government, which makes policies and laws, but allows the bureaucracy to administer those without fear or favour. The professionalism of the urban administration was the essence of the urban reform movement in American and European cities in the early 20th century, which had long suffered from the ‘spoil system’ of local politics.

Pakistani cities have been besieged by the worst of both spoils systems where rulers serve their personal and partisan interests, and the corrupted bureaucracy, which has lost its professionalism. The third wheel of good urban governance is the citizens’ participation in decision-making. Neighbourhood and community organisations mobilise citizens to express their needs and act as a check on the arbitrariness of politicians and bureaucracies. This is a lesson that Western cities learnt in the1960s in the second wave of urban reforms. On this score also, Pakistani cities are severely lacking.

Pakistani cities need a hefty dose of urban reforms to build an accountable but secure bureaucracy, a transparent local government and an organized and mobilised citizenry. Good governance is the primary collective good for Pakistani cities from which flow all other facilities and services. Yet public administration has steadily declined while cities and towns have exploded. A person centred administration does not suit an urban society. It turns into arbitrariness if not tyranny.

Pakistani cities are simultaneously afflicted by the ills of an agrarian era and the challenges of global times. Take Karachi as an example. While at the time of the last census (1998), a majority of houses (56%) were 1-2 room structures crowded with 5-7 persons and close to 44% had latrines and baths shared by many, but a small minority lived in palatial homes of the Defence, North Nazimabad, Bath Island and PECHS. There is the pre-industrial dust and rotting garbage blowing in the air as well as chemical fumes and exhaust of the industrial era.

Obviously the conditions have not improved since then.

Yet both rich and poor are affected by load shedding, water shortages, air pollution, crime, terrorism and traffic jams. The rich may live in private luxury, but they cannot escape the public squalor outside their homes.

Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta are equally full of contradictions and provide a poor quality of life. Towns like Jacobabad or DI Khan are not far behind in these matters. On top of these unmet basic needs for traditional infrastructure and services, these cities now are threatened by the rising tide of orthodox Islam as well as global warming and pandemics.

Pakistan will not know peace and stability without improving the quality of life in Cities. To do that a programme of urban reforms needs to be initiated in parallel with police measures to control terrorism and extremism. One will not succeed without the other. A majority of Pakistanis live and earn their living in urban areas and their surroundings. Pakistan’s social and economic development depends on peace and prosperity of its cities.

The agenda for urban reforms include establishing a transparent, accountable and efficient local government. It should involve citizens in decision-making through community meetings, task forces, public hearings and people’s access to public records. Another element of the urban reforms is the provision of low cost community based provisions of water, garbage collection, sanitation, drainage and bus transport. They may not be all developed and managed by public agencies. A country wide movement of promoting community co-operatives, regulated private sector and other imaginative arrangements of financing and managing the basic infrastructure must be undertaken on revolutionary basis in all cities and towns.

For example, why not build thousands of regulated, limited profit, privately managed latrines and restrooms in public places of cities and towns. This measure alone will clean up cities and ease the daily life of thousands living in Katchi Abadis, those labouring in streets or shoppers in markets. Similarly give priority to pedestrian and bicycle traffic over cars, promote internet/ telephone based transactions of public business in government offices. Streamline procedures and reduce the discretionary powers of both elected and appointed officials. Rules based decision-making should be easy to transact impersonally without the need to line up at police stations, courts, WAPDA and other public agencies.

Actively promote small businesses and encourage new enterprises for creating jobs and stimulating economic development. Regularise Katchi Abadis and provide incentives/ subsidies for low cost housing construction. Rationalise rental-housing markets and remove impediments to building homes for rent. The point is that priority should be given to measures that put a floor under the feet of the poor in cities and towns. Meeting basic needs by mobilising the people’s energies and initiatives is the strategy of improving the quality of life in poor countries like Pakistan, not building mega projects for the rich or giving plots to favourite groups.