Session 3: Emotional Geography of Pakistani Cities

Cities have physical geographies we can measure: roads, buildings, distances. But they also have emotional geographies; landscapes of feeling that shape how we actually experience and use urban space. The same street corner doesn't just look different to different people. It feels different. It carries different weight. It demands different navigation. Emotional geography asks how a city feels. Not as metaphor, but as something real that affects who moves where, when, how, and why. It maps the feelings that come with urban life, such as fear and comfort, vigilance and ease, belonging and alienation, nostalgia and possibility and pays attention to how these feelings distribute across neighborhoods, times of day, who you are, and what you've lived through. This Caravanserai gathering explores emotional geography in Pakistani cities and why it matters for development. Understanding how cities feel isn't soft psychology divorced from hard development priorities. Emotional geography shapes economic participation, access to services, social connection, political engagement, physical health, mental health. When you navigate your city through constant vigilance rather than ease, when large parts of urban space feel hostile or unwelcoming, when anxiety or alienation becomes your default experience—these aren't just quality of life issues. They're constraints that limit what's possible, restrict economic productivity, and keep inequality in place. Yet we don't really know how to talk about this, let alone measure it. We have limited vocabulary and inadequate methods for making emotional geographies visible, naming their patterns, translating lived experience into something that planning or policy can actually work with. So this session asks: How do we map what cities 'feel' like? What methods might surface emotional geographies? How do we move from individual stories to collective patterns to systemic understanding?