You are listening to "Story of mobility". A podcast about the international experiences of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. In this episode of "Story of mobility", we welcome Zahra Hussain, a Pakistani architect and human geographer, who talks about her research into mountain communities in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, faced with climate change and infrastructure development.
My name is Zahra Hussain, I'm from Pakistan. I've been trained as an architect and a human geographer. I've set up an organization called Laajverd about 15 years ago. And, through that organization, we have been working mostly in the mountain communities of Pakistan, which is also known as the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, to work with local communities and to understand how their heritage and their lives are arranged and transforming, with the climate change and infrastructural development.
My research is basically based on how mountain communities are grappling with the effects of climate change and large infrastructural development in the Hindu Kush Himalayan mountain region, which is in the northern part of Pakistan. I'm particularly interested in how mountain communities negotiate their everyday life amidst these challenges, especially by looking at how they're using their land and how they are negotiating their livelihoods.
In the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, I'm looking at multiple communities across the region. So I'm particularly working with the Kalash people and then I'm working with some communities in Gilgit-Baltistan and then I'm also focusing on a community in Gojal Valley.
So geologically speaking, the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain region is considered a very young mountain range, which means that they're continuing to grow and they are fragile spaces where you also encounter a lot of landslides and the land isn't really stable.
This fragility is is exacerbated by climate change and rising temperatures, because you also have a lot of glaciers, which are damming these glacial lakes inside them and once you know the temperature rises, the walls become very weak and then you have these lakes that burst, which causes a lot of glacier lake outburst flooding.
This flooding has not only destroyed a lot of fields and infrastructure that local communities have developed in their mountain valleys but the rising temperature also affects their orchards and crops that they grow in the area. So climate change is really affecting these mountain communities and their lives and livelihoods as well.
With respect to tourism development, since the Covid 19, a lot of domestic tourists have started going up into the mountains and sort of touring in these valleys, which has also affected the built infrastructure in these areas. So a lot of small hotels and guesthouses have come up and people are seen to be selling off their agricultural land in order to build hotels. So the whole sort of way in which people are used to living in these areas is rapidly changing. This has a lot of effects and this is something that I'm looking at in my research, in terms of how people are negotiating their everyday life and how they're trying to make do and live on amidst these changes, which are not just due to climate change, but also the influx of the tourism industry.
So the research that we do in mountain areas, I also run an organization called Laarjverd. And for the last 15 years we have been working in mountain communities. This research is not only confined to academic research, but also, we try to collaborate with communities to really understand what are the problems on the ground and how can design interventions be done in order to respond to those problems that the communities face. And then in the last couple of years, we've also seen that with design, we also need some policy interventions, which have to be sort of adopted so that the development is done in a more responsible way.
With that respect, we worked in Kalash Valley with a government department, and we developed, building bylaws and guidelines, so that the built environment in Kalash Valley is not adversely affected by tourism. So, you know, people don't just start building guest houses and hotels in areas, which are not fit for building construction.
So we've tried to do that and we're still sort of trying to see how these are adopted and implemented by the government. It's quite a long journey, but I would say that we've sort of stepped into that terrain and we're still sort of trying to see how it's going to be adopted.
I think, as a mediation role, in some parts is easy and in some parts it's difficult, because there are certain things that require a lot of implementation from the government side.
And we see that that side is very slow and it's very difficult to get something to be implemented. So you can propose policies, but, unless and until they are implemented, it's of no use at all. It is a very long process and it gets very frustrating as well. With communities, it is much easier to work. And what we've seen is that, if we want to work with the community and if we want to get something done, it happens much quicker than if you involve the government. Once the government is involved, it takes longer and it's a slower process. A lot of things also get changed and get lost in translation as well.
In some valleys where we see that the government isn't present as much, that's where our work happens much quickly and in a much better way.
In France, particularly, it's interesting, because I've, met with a few people who have been working in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region for a very long time. I've had the chance to look at their work and to see their archives, especially photographic archives, that they've been keeping. These people have encountered these mountain communities and these areas back in the 1970s and 80s, so their view on these landscapes is also very very important to see how the transformation has occurred and how it continues to occur. Other than that, I've also visited, some archives here and some libraries, so it's been quite pleasant and helpful.
Back in 2012, I've set up a project called "Academy for democracy" and the idea was to build a platform for Pakistani students to be able to conduct interdisciplinary and cross-curricular research, which is something that you don't often come across in the universities in Pakistan.
Under this project, I started the Laajverd Visiting School program, in which you go into a mountain area for about two weeks and you live with the local community and you have workshops ranging from the natural environment geology to human geography, architecture and the arts. Students or the participants really get a chance to holistically understand and encounter the environment and understand the challenges that the local communities face.
The whole idea of the project is for students to learn to develop context based solutions to the problems that they see and to see how we need to start asking the right questions and how our research needs to be embedded in the communities and the context that we belong to, rather than just coming up with the Western idea and trying to implemented in the local context, which never really works. And this is something that, I felt, we need to do, because, at the time, a lot of NGOs in Pakistan were really bringing these Western ideas and implementing those on the communities and the projects would fail. So the idea was to really see what is the context at hand and how do we respond to those in a more informed way.
The paths to development need to be those that the communities agree with, but also where the landscape is not compromised, so the exploitation and degradation of the landscape shouldn't happen. That's what the project was really about and this is something that we've been now running for the last ten years. This would be our 10th year of the visiting school that we will conduct in July in Ascoli Valley in Baltistan.
At the moment I'm trying to write this book called "Heritage cosmopolitics" and that is particularly looking at how mountain communities are grappling with the changes that are occurring in their landscapes, not only with respect to climate change, but also infrastructural development related to tourism in the valleys. With that book, it's just a start at the moment, but I'm really hoping to write it in the next couple of months and have it published soon, because this will really give people an insight to how we might start looking at these landscapes, other than the way that we are used to seeing them as these natural conservatories.
This is really about people and their experience of mountain valleys and the way that they are grappling with these changes.
Produced by the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, this podcast has been recorded in June 2024.