The summers in Karachi are pretty harsh, with its constant dust and heat waves up to 45oC plus the insane traffic all contribute to a feeling which can be best described as being stuck inside a swamp with the air turned off, sometimes even literally courtesy the ever brilliant KESC. The harshness of this concrete jungle of 27 million souls even without the billboards so amazingly removed by our erstwhile justice system is only compounded by the fact that there exist a total of 20 major parks in this city. That’s it, I kid you not, at least the ones that can still be called parks with green grass areas and trees. Compare this to say Vienna and you will find that 51 percent of that city is classified as green space. This severe lack of green spaces is not something which is a recent phenomenon however but is a relationship inversely proportional to the number of schools of an unregistered kind that have been invading our park space over the years. It usually starts very quietly with a small section of the park being cordoned off for the praying facility of its visitors something obviously none of us would object to, which then leads to a cordoning off in this specific area. Lo and behold sooner rather than later the space is blessed by a small structure obviously for the kids who need this kind of tutelage coming to the park and so it grows and grows until the park is in the corner rather than the section deemed for facilitation. In fact I actually am at a loss to understand where to pray these days because my own neighbourhood has three places of prayer plus the one in the park off course while the inhabitants are not enough to fill even one of them in totality. Obviously there must be a perfectly legitimate reason for it, but it seems lately that oxygen whether in the shape of trees or the freedom to evoke logic is in scarce supply. So what shall we do? Imran Khans planted a gazillion trees beyond the wall but where are we supposed to get our green from? Or are we living in some kind of Lawrence of Arabia fantasy waiting to be rescued from this desertly existence, or perhaps we want to create our own green water world in the mangroves which are also diminishing at an alarming rate. May be we should hand over the rest of our parks to our great developer friends as well to erect giant steel and glass structures on them. All over the world a city’s urban planning includes these very vital green spaces which are both a hub for bio diversity and necessary as a public space to interact for the urban areas residents. Perhaps the acute shortage of them in this city is reason enough to understand why our own diversity is at threat and interaction limited to small silos of comfort. The writer is a Karachi-based social media analyst/trainer