Why it looks like this

Karachi began as the walled trading town of Kolachi and grew under the British into a tidy port capital of a few hundred thousand people — the old city's bazaar lanes and the colonial quarter around Saddar still show that era.

In 1947 it became Pakistan's first capital and received hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from India within months; the population multiplied several times in a few years. Planned townships, then vast unplanned katchi abadis, spread across the desert plain — a megacity of over fifteen million assembled in two generations.