This essay examines the influence of uncertainty on how contemporary cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited. This influence is demonstrated through the analysis of various domains of urban planning and governance (disaster, security, energy, and transportation) across four cities of the global South (Bogotá, Karachi, Accra, and Johannesburg). In each city, uncertainty is produced by historical conditions and productive of future possibilities.

This paper analyses conditions of insecurity and violence in Karachi in relation to an emerging geography whereby the city is fragmented into various enclaves of business, leisure, and residence. Although enclavisation is largely viewed as a response to heightened urban crime and violence, the paper argues that sociopolitical conditions generated by processes of enclavisation themselves create circumstances that generate a continuum of violence. Qualitative data from two selected residential enclaves within Karachi illustrate the argument. The experience of residents, visitors and workers within the two enclaves is relationally reviewed within the context of urban politics in Karachi. The conclusion highlights the agency of urban space in structuring conflict in Karachi by exacerbating differences, heightening vulnerabilities, and reconfigurestate society relations.

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Every few years, Karachi floods during the summer monsoon. The flooding brings latent manoeuvrings by political actors looking to establish their hold over the city to the surface. Politicians, urban administrators, and relevant state and non-state institutions blame historical planning failures, informal and illegal constructions, institutional conflict, incapable municipal governance, and widespread corruption for the flooding. They move quickly to establish authority and consolidate power while offering 'fixes'. Eviction drives against 'illegal settlements' built along storm-water drains, heavy taxes, fines, and demolitions of non-conforming constructions, institutional reforms, budget allocations, and project approvals for new infrastructure all happen at once. Once the emergency ceases, key players in urban politics -resident groups, community associations, political parties, municipal authorities, land developers, planners, international non-governmental organisations, and military institutions -start working on projects of accumulation and entrenchment, in preparation for the next crisis. In this paper, we look at the space-time of Karachi's certain and yet uncertain flooding crisis as a moment to study the politics of the maybe in the Pakistani megacity. Outlining marginal and affluent residents' lived experiences in a flooding city and relating their politics with governmental responses to immediate and possible future floods, we study the conditions of inhabitation, citizenship claims, and governmental relations in Karachi. We argue that the monsoon's expectant arrival becomes a locus for articulating and modulating different kinds of popular vernaculars, governmental practices, and political manoeuvrings for institutional and individual actors seeking profit and power in and through Karachi. The politics of the maybe hinges on actors entrenching their political positions without care, taking away any possibility for a shared, coherent worldview for all Karachiites. In conclusion, we argue that distant interests and logics of this politics of governance and inhabitation are inherently exploitative, threatening to pull apart the very city they thrive on.

residents. Over the last decade, rapid urbanisation, explosive politics, and spectacular forms of violence in Karachi have captured the attention of urban scholars, policy-makers, and enthusiasts alike. Yet the scholarship on political conflict in Karachi remains rooted within onto-epistemological frameworks that foreground statebuilding efforts and planning regimes as central themes that frame Karachi's troubled socio-political condition. While such accounts are no doubt useful in capturing the complex negotiations between governance and politics in Karachi, Gayer's book takes this analysis a step further and interprets political violence in Karachi as an organising feature of the city's politics. In doing so, he creatively challenges the widespread interpretation of the megacity as one that is progressively descending into chaos and anarchy, and instead suggests that disorder in Karachi is inherently ordered.