Karachi Urban Lab

The Karachi Urban Lab is an interdisciplinary, collaborative platform of research, teaching, mentoring, and advocacy. The lab was set up in 2016 in a context where data production on the ‘urban’ in Pakistan remains top-down and largely technocratic. The KUL fills a ‘gap’ in data/knowledge production from the ground up and in a critically oriented way.

Gulnaz Anjum is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She leads projects on cultural and social psychological research on climate change, migration, social justice, and psychological vulnerabilities. Anjum’s research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the mental health impacts of extreme heat and flooding.

Nausheen H Anwar is professor of city and regional planning at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, Pakistan. She is also lead and principal investigator of Cities and Climate Resilience program at the International Institute for Environment and Development, London. Anwar’s work looks at the impacts of climate change on cities in the global north and south, with a focus on extreme heat and flooding.

Duaa Sameer holds a bachelor’s degree in social development and policy from Habib University. She has been associated with the Karachi Urban Lab since 2022, where her work spans issues of climate change and urban vulnerability as it impacts social wellbeing — especially for the city’s most marginalized, across intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity.