Where Development Fails
"Friction and Life in
Self-Built Neighbourhoods"
ETHNOMAD
Dr Tom Corcoran.
Published by ETHNOMAD, 1st of January 2026
Every time I arrive in Karachi, Noor is there. It does not matter whether I arrive by plane, train, or after a long, broken journey across the city. He finds his way. He always does. He waits near the exit, dressed in his best clothes, which I know are few. Somewhere along the way, he has usually managed to spill something on himself. Tea, oil, water, sometimes all three. He laughs, brushes at the stain, and insists on carrying my bag. This has happened often enough that it has become a measure of return. If Noor is there, I am back in the city. If he is not, something is wrong.
Noor has spent his life in what development reports usually call a slum, or more politely, an informal settlement. He never uses either term. He refers to the place where he lives as a self-built neighbourhood, or in Urdu, Khud ta‘mīr shuda ābādī (خود تعمیر شدہ آبادی), not as a slogan or a correction, but as a description. The difference is not semantic.
Slum describes absence. Informal settlement describes illegality. Self-built neighbourhood describes work.
In Khud ta‘mīr shuda ābādī, Noor is naming a place made through labour, adjustment, and persistence, walls raised by hand. Roofs are repaired again and again. Lanes negotiated rather than planned. Lives are shaped through effort under pressure. When he uses the term, he is not defending anything. He is describing how things came into being.
Over time, I realised that this way of naming places was also a way of understanding how life works inside them. Self-built neighbourhoods exist because people have learned how to live with friction rather than wait for it to disappear. Noor would put it simply. Without friction, nothing holds. Nothing grows. What matters is whether friction becomes something you can work with, or something that slowly pins you in place. This way of seeing reveals that friction, rather than poverty or informality, is the most useful entry point for understanding life in self-built neighbourhoods.
That understanding did not arrive as a theory. It arrived through years of watching how Noor moved through the city, and how others moved through him.
Noor came to Karachi as part of the Rohingya migration that unfolded in waves through the 1970s and 1980s, following unrest and persecution in what is now Myanmar. Unlike the more recent displacement narrative associated with Bangladesh, this earlier movement into Pakistan slipped quietly out of international view. There were no emergency appeals, no global summits, no durable solutions. There was simply the work of arriving, staying, and building a life without papers, protection, or promises.
Rohingya families settled among other marginalised groups along the edges of the city, forming a mosaic of self-built neighbourhoods closely tied to labour and the sea. Over time, they became embedded within a predominantly Sunni Sufi cultural milieu. Religious practice adapted. Language shifted. Customs blended. Identity is layered rather than disappearing. This long-term settlement reveals something short timelines rarely show. Knowledge does not survive by standing still. It survives by being used.
Among Rohingya families, this is often described as raywase shekka. The phrase does not translate neatly. It refers to knowledge learned through living rather than teaching. Not doctrine. Not instruction. Not something written down. It is knowledge formed through repetition, error, correction, and memory. How to negotiate. When to wait. Whom to trust? Where risk sits today, not yesterday.
For Noor, traditional knowledge was never something to preserve. It was something to apply. It shaped how trust was extended, how disputes were settled, how credit moved, and how dignity was maintained when recognition did not exist. It was the quiet framework through which friction was understood and managed rather than resisted.
Traditional knowledge in places like Arakanabad does not announce itself. It does not appear as a ceremony or display. It operates in the background, shaping how people navigate uncertainty and recover from disruption.
It determines how obligations are remembered without records.
How agreements are honoured without contracts.
How conflicts are resolved without courts.
This is not nostalgia. It is operational intelligence.
Mohammad Noor, a community elder in a self-built neighbourhood of Karachi. Leadership here is informal and earned over time, shaped by memory, negotiation, and an intimate understanding of where daily life slows, stalls, and recovers.
Leadership in this context is not about authority. It is about reducing friction for others. Helping someone avoid a wasted journey. Clarifying an agreement before it hardens into conflict. Vouching where proof cannot be produced. These acts rarely appear in any dataset, yet they form the real infrastructure of survival. What I learned from Noor was not how to solve problems, but how to notice where life slows down.
He never spoke in the language of needs.
He spoke in the language of delays, proof, trust, and recovery.
Will the payment come today or next week.
Can the work already done be shown if questioned.
Will this visit cost a full day and still fail.
Is this agreement clear enough to avoid trouble later.
If something goes wrong, how quickly can things be steadied again.
These were not complaints. They were assessments. Life in a self-built neighbourhood is a continuous series of decisions made with very little margin for error. The labour involved is not only physical. It is administrative, relational, and psychological. Much of it goes into navigating friction that does not announce itself as a crisis, but accumulates quietly, day by day. People do not organise their lives around problems. Problems are too abstract. They organise around friction. Around the points where effort leaks away, where time is lost, where dignity is tested, where small mistakes become large consequences.
Friction is not inconvenience. It is the difference between effort that accumulates and effort that resets. Without friction, nothing moves. Without resistance, there is no traction. But when friction is badly placed, or too heavy, movement collapses. Progress stalls not because people lack capacity, but because the ground is too heavy to push against. There is another place where these friction points surface, often misunderstood and too easily explained away as culture alone. Domestic violence and child marriage tend to appear not at the centre of people’s values, but at the edge of their options. They cluster where pressure has accumulated and no longer has anywhere to go.
When income collapses, when documentation blocks school access, when repeated bureaucratic failure strips dignity, when debt tightens, and uncertainty becomes constant, decisions are made under extreme constraint. Violence can emerge as a tragic release of pressure. Early marriage can appear as a way to resolve multiple frictions at once. These are not expressions of tradition in isolation. They are signals that effort no longer accumulates, that future planning has collapsed into survival, and that friction has become inescapable. Understanding this does not excuse harm. It explains where it comes from and why approaches that ignore background pressure so often fail.
What people in self-built neighbourhoods lack is not skill, intelligence, or resilience. Those are everywhere.
What they lack is leverage.
They lack systems that remember what they have already done.
They lack proof that travels beyond their immediate networks.
They lack translation between lived reality and formal systems.
They lack protection from endless repetition and quiet humiliation.
Their work does not compound. Their history does not count.
Once you begin to see life this way, the question of development changes.
The question is no longer which sector to intervene in or how to refine a Theory of Change. The question becomes where intelligence is missing in the system, and why effort fails to accumulate. It is with this understanding that I leave Karachi and return to Dhaka.
As we begin our research in Korail Basti, the largest self-built neighbourhood in the country, the same dynamics appear almost immediately, written into the data as clearly as they are into daily life, revealing a history of development cycles that touch down, move on, and leave little behind. Korail has existed for roughly thirty-five years, growing from a small lakeside settlement into a dense urban neighbourhood of around two hundred thousand residents, more than half of whom have no formal legal documentation. It has been built incrementally by people drawn to Dhaka’s labour market, held together by daily negotiation rather than formal inclusion. Over those decades, significant resources have passed through Korail. Clinics, schools, water points, training programmes. Many mattered in the moment. Few changed how life moves through the neighbourhood over time. The core frictions remain. Insecure tenure. Legal invisibility. Repetition without memory.
Korail Basti, Dhaka’s largest self-built neighbourhood, is located adjacent to some of the city’s wealthiest districts, including Gulshan 2 and Banani. This proximity reveals a stark urban contrast, in which informal settlements and affluence coexist within the same geography, shaped by vastly different access to land, legality, and opportunity.
What stands out is not failure, but endurance under pressure. In Korail Basti, it becomes clear very quickly that life is not organised by sectors, and it is not experienced as a series of discrete problems. Health, education, livelihoods, protection, housing, and governance are not separate domains here. They are different expressions of the same underlying question: where does friction accumulate, and how heavy does it become before life begins to break down? As Noor would quietly tell me, Korail is not a collection of needs awaiting attention, nor a list of problems waiting to be created. People are not struggling because they lack training, skills, or motivation. They are struggling because their effort does not accumulate, because systems fail to remember, and because friction keeps pulling life back to the starting line.
Seen from the ground, Korail is not waiting to be fixed. It is already working hard to hold itself together. This is where my attention now rests. Not on identifying new problems, but on understanding friction as it is lived. Where movement slows. Where effort resets. Where continuity breaks down. And where, despite skill, intelligence, and persistence, lives remain pinned in place. It is also here that I begin, cautiously, to sense that something new may be possible. If artificial intelligence has a role in places like Korail, it will not be as a grand solution or a technological fix. It will not arrive through platforms, dashboards, or innovation labs. Its relevance, if it exists at all, lies much lower, at the precise points where life repeatedly gets stuck. What matters is not AI’s capacity to predict or optimise, but its ability to recognise patterns of repetition. Delay. Effort that fails to accumulate.
Systems that forget what has already been done. Places where human energy is spent again and again with no carryover. Whether AI can meaningfully support people at these friction points remains an open question. It demands humility, careful observation, and sustained proximity to daily life rather than abstract promise. It cannot be assumed. It has to be tested slowly, alongside those who already understand where friction lives. That exploration begins here, in Korail Basti. How it unfolds, what proves useful, and what does not, will be taken up in the next piece. For now, it is enough to say this.
If development is to change anything of consequence in places like Korail, it will have to start where friction already exists. It will have to learn to listen before it attempts to intervene.
That is where the work now moves next.
