We Built Cities But Forgot to Build Safety

Why modern urban planning is failing us in the face of climate disaster

The rain wasn’t supposed to kill anyone. But it did. Again.

This July, more than 135 lives were lost in Central Texas, swept away in the most devastating inland flood the region has seen in nearly half a century. Thousands of miles away, the same skies turned cruel. Karachi’s streets transformed into open sewers, Delhi’s metro stations sank under rising water, and Dubai’s luxury neighborhoods were swallowed by a torrent of stormwater. What connects these disasters isn’t just rain. It’s the way our cities, symbols of progress, ambition, and innovation, keep collapsing under it.

We keep calling these events “natural disasters,” but there is nothing natural about their scale. They are human failures dressed up as tragedies. Poorly built infrastructure, ignored zoning laws, outdated flood maps, political neglect, these are the real causes of our drowning cities.

For decades, cities have been planned for expansion, for spectacle, for upward growth. Yet in the race to build taller, faster, shinier, we forgot to build safety. We ignored the ground beneath our foundations, the drainage paths we paved over, the wetlands we erased. We didn’t plan for the rain. And now, the rain is planning for us.

In Karachi, this failure is an annual cycle. Each monsoon brings devastation, not just to roads and homes but to people’s lives. The city of 22 million lacks a working drainage system for much of its sprawl. Construction has blocked natural water routes, and informal settlements along stormwater drains, ignored by planning authorities, turn into deadly traps. There hasn’t been a new master plan since the 1960s. Urban planning is reactive, if it happens at all. The result? A city that drowns on schedule.

But this isn’t a problem limited to the Global South. In July 2025, the world watched as Central Texas became the epicenter of a historic disaster. Highways turned into rivers. Homes were swept away. The emergency alert system failed to reach many. What made it worse was that much of the flooding occurred in areas that had seen unchecked development over the last two decades, developments that should never have been approved in high-risk flood zones. Wetlands, which once served as natural buffers, had been erased for housing and commercial use. Dams, meant to protect, overflowed instead. Science was available. The warnings existed. The decisions were political.

And in every case, it is the poor who pay the highest price. They live in the lowest parts of the city, in homes not built to survive floodwaters, on land that’s often considered “illegal”, and thus unworthy of help. They do not have flood insurance. They do not have emergency savings. And when disaster strikes, their names are the first on the list of the dead.

This global pattern, of cities turning on their most vulnerable during climate disasters, reveals a deeper truth. Our cities were never built to be safe for everyone. They were built for the economy. For the elite. For the image.

What makes this even more devastating is that the solutions are known. Urban planners have long pushed for porous roads that can absorb water, green spaces that reduce heat and flooding, early warning systems based on satellite data, and laws that restrict construction in high-risk zones. These are not radical ideas. But they are inconvenient. They require long-term thinking in a system that runs on short-term gain. They require political courage in an environment that rewards profit.

A young architecture student in Lahore recently put it best: “We’re taught how to design buildings that win awards, not how to keep them from drowning in 2035.” That mindset, valuing aesthetic over safety, form over function, pervades design schools and city councils alike. Until we change it, we will keep building cities that gleam in the sun and fall apart in the rain.

What is a city, if it cannot protect its people?What is progress, if it turns fatal every time the clouds gather?

We need to stop designing cities to impress.And start designing them to survive.