Chaotic urbanization: The unholy alliance of Pakistan’s property tycoons and politicians
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Cities in Pakistan are expanding rapidly, and in all directions haphazardly-- which makes urbanization messy, unsustainable and ungovernable. According to the 2017 census, 36.4% of the population lived in cities that the United Nations Development Program estimates will grow to 50% by 2025. The annual urban growth rate of Pakistan is slightly higher than other South Asian countries, which is about 3%.
Urbanization is considered a manifestation of development, economic growth and general progress of a society. Cities around the world are centers of technological evolution and economic activity, generating about 80% of Gross National Product (GDP). Pakistan’s cities contribute around 55% to the GDP.
The rate of urbanization is regarded as a measure of advancement. According to Dr Ishrat Husain, former Governor of State Bank of Pakistan, a country can make a transition to the rank of middle income if its urbanization reaches 50%. It is the development of the service sector and industrialization that serves as a magnet for cities to pull populations from rural areas and employ them in new professions. We may add higher population growth rates and displacement of landless peasants as two additional factors causing migration to cities.
There are however, serious questions about managing urbanization in Pakistan. Cities over the past few decades have expanded beyond limits, if there were any. Illegal housing development societies, slums and informal settlements have generated multiple problems of providing adequate services, maintaining law and order and employment. Consequently, major Pakistani cities face widespread street crimes, house burglaries, robberies at gunpoint, and murders. There are also social and economic issues associated with class, and on that count, allocation of spaces in the cities. Major urban areas have become divided between sprawling slums without much of the facilities of urban life and middle and upper-class neighborhoods that are generally protected by private security guards. They represent uneven economic growth, inequality and social stratification with glaring contrasts, where ethnic and extremist organizations find a fertile ground for the recruitment of their foot soldiers. Newcomers from villages, often uprooted from their native communities, alienated and in search of an identity in a new social environment are more likely to join their ranks. There is enough evidence from so many countries to support this view.
In Pakistan today, it is not the tech industry, innovation or industrial giants that dominate the economy. It is the property tycoons, the new riches that have grown influential, spreading their power to expensive private education and electronic media.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
The problem is not urbanization itself; it is the lack of an adequate and functioning policy framework to regulate urban development. There are three types of urban land development agencies that work parallel to one another—the official, private and informal types are engaged in the lucrative business or housing development that offer huge opportunities for making fortunes. In Pakistan today, it is not the tech industry, innovation or industrial giants that dominate the economy. It is the property tycoons, the new riches that have grown influential, spreading their power to expensive private education and electronic media. The get-rich business has created a nexus between property tycoons and the influential political class in the society that keeps smoothing the way for informal and private developers to grab fertile agricultural lands without any regard for environment, water resources or sustainability. In many cases, the authorities governing land ownership systems and those regulating the housing development have facilitated, for a price, allotment of public lands, and even forests to private societies. Successive governments have balked at a coherent and enforceable land-use policy at the federal or provincial levels. This is quite deliberate to use the absence of policy for official discretion in approving housing societies. Even when some good frameworks existed for decades and preserved agricultural areas around Islamabad, the capital, a post-Musharraf government changed it to allow the private sector to establish housing societies. One can sadly see the disappearance of green hill tops and vast agricultural landscape in all directions of the city. The story of other cities is no different.
Sadly, the pace for agriculture in the face of growing food insecurity is shrinking with the horizontal spread of cities, and the country is becoming more and more water scarce. Environmental degradation is one of the highest, and yet there are no effective voices to influence urban policy in the elite driven politics of Pakistan. There are only limited discourses on the impact of unplanned growth of cities on the environment, water and energy sustainability and governance, and without much influence. It is really a strange case of urbanization without any effective local government systems. The unholy alliance of property-tycoons and the political class has thwarted all efforts to establish one that is independent of the provincial governments. It is a sad reflection on how old and new elites have captured the cities and used their land resources against public good.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Twitter: @RasulRais
