This study presents Karachi as a layered South Asian urban landscape where politics, memory, and ecology intersect, each shaping the city’s literary imagining, as depicted in Saeed’s novel The Year of Sound and Heat (Saeed, 2022). It studies the representation of Karachi’s urban landscape from the perspective of literary urban imaginaries. For this purpose, it explores landscapes of memory present within Karachi’s urban landscape from a political context, drawing on De Nardi and Drozdzewski’s (2019) integrated notions of the politics of place and landscapes of memory. Furthermore, it traces the interrelation between Karachi’s urban landscape and ecology through Cassar’s (2019) notion of landscape ecology. The findings reveal that Karachi’s political past is deeply intertwined with its existing urban landscape, which is portrayed in the novel through the narrator Jogi’s recollections. Jogi’s recollections of the past reveal a persistent cycle of violence in the city by evoking images of neglect, repression, and marginalization inscribed in Karachi’s urban landscape. Furthermore, the novel presents two prominent landscapes of memory situated within Karachi, i.e., the old coffee shop and Karachi’s graveyard, evoking the city’s decay.  These landscapes of memory portray Jogi, Natasha, and Disco's memories associated with violence and urban insecurity in Karachi and its impact on the characters’ lives by mapping the politics of place. They also underscore the vulnerability of Karachi’s ecological systems due to unchecked urban expansion. It conveys how literature intertwines politics and memory with environmental degradation to depict Karachi’s shifting physical and symbolic landscape.

Keywords: landscapes of memory; violence; environmental degradation; Karachi; South Asian urban literature

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