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Abstract
Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is one of the country’s fastest growing cities, the labouring poor comprising the majority of its residents. Many migrants from rural hinterlands and war-ravaged regions reside in informal squatter settlements on the city’s rapidly expanding agrarian–urban frontier. In recent years, violent demolitions of these settlements, known as katchi abadis, have increased in accordance with the growing demand for land as a financial asset in the form of gated housing schemes. Islamabad is a microcosm of contemporary processes of urbanisation across both Global North and South. Dispossession of both rural and urban working-class communities to make way for for-profit real estate development is an increasingly common practice in many countries, reflecting systemic transformation in the logic of global capitalism towards ‘financialisation’. Our case study engages the theoretical literature on financialisation and real estate along with recent empirical work on dialectical processes of development and dispossession in the Global South. In Islamabad, a ‘militarised developer state’ featuring civil and military bureaucracies, private contractors and city development authorities props up the dominant land-use paradigm, which deeply exacerbates urban land inequality and fuels both construction and destruction of katchi abadis which house a large segment of the city’s working-class population.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on an earlier draft which have substantially enriched this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Katchi abadis are informal squatter settlements located across the urban landscape – in cities, towns and peri-urban areas – typically built on government land.
2 Niaz Ali, 31 July 2015.
3 A similar nexus of power exists in Karachi, as illustrated by Anwar (Citation2012, Citation2014) in highly nuanced and rich ways.
4 Nasir Khan, elected councilor from Union Council Bokra (within which I-11 katchi abadi was located), 12 January 2016.
5 https://participedia.net/organization/4540, accessed on 8 April 2021.
6 https://www.tanqeed.org/2015/12/they-razed-our-homes/, accessed on 8 April 2021.
7 Prior to submitting the paper, we once again reached out to and confirmed with all of our primary informants whether they would prefer for us to quote them anonymously. They all agreed to explicit disclosure instead of anonymity; we are confident that there are no outstanding ethical or other concerns in quoting them directly.
8 https://www.thenews.com.pk/archive/print/483761-ihc-orders-cda-to-remove-illegal-%E2%80%98katchi-abadis%E2%80%99-in-one-month, accessed on 8 April 2021.
9 The petition is available at: https://awamiworkersparty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Katchi-Abadis-Final.pdf, accessed on 8 April 2021.
10 Available at: http://uu.urbanunit.gov.pk/enewsletters/urbanatlas/index.html#p=96, accessed on 8 April 2021.
11 The allotting of land to military personnel is a practice that can be traced back to the British Raj, colonial authorities always keen to ‘buy’ the loyalty of native soldiers that could always be swayed by ‘seditious’ elements within India.
12 Fazal Shah, I-11 resident and community leader, October 2014.
13 Government of Punjab, The Land Acquisition Act 1894. Retrieved from http://punjablaws.gov.pk/laws/12.html, accessed on 8 April 2021.
14 As narrated by the Deputy Director, Katchi Abadi Cell, Rohan Channa, December 2017.
15 Israr Ahmed Satti, February 2016.
16 http://www.cda.gov.pk/housing/unauthorised_schemes.asp, April 2019, accessed on 8 April 2021.
17 The Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority (SKAA) was formed by a legislative act (Sindh Katchi Abadi Act) in 1987. SKAA has, to date, overseen the regularisation and upgradation of over 600 katchi abadis, mostly in Karachi, but also in other urban areas of the province. Property titles have been issued to most of the residents of regularised abadis, and virtually all settlements now enjoy basic amenities such as electricity, gas and water. Efforts are underway to recognise all katchi abadis that came into existence before 1997. In Punjab too some measures have been taken by the authorities to acknowledge the katchi abadi phenomenon. A Directorate of Katchi Abadis established in 1992 under the Punjab Katchi Abadi Act has surveyed existing katchi abadis in the province and to date has regularised at least 300 – an amendment to the original bill was passed in 2012 so that newer katchi abadis (built up until 2011) were also approved for regularisation and upgrading.
18 March 2018.
19 The dichotomy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ bureaucracy is taken from Akhtar (Citation2018).
20 March 2018.
21 See, for example, a recent special issue of the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (vol. 52, March 2020) which focuses on real estate developers. To our knowledge, deep dives on the ‘losers’ of real estate developmentalism are conspicuous by their absence.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is Associate Professor of political economy at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, previously with the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He works on diverse subjects such as state theory, class formation, colonial history and social movements. He has published widely in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Peasant Studies and Critical Asian Studies. He is also the author of three books, most recently The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan (Cambridge, 2018). He also writes a syndicated column for Pakistan’s newspaper-of-record, DAWN. Alongside his academic pursuits, he has also been closely affiliated with political and social movements in Pakistan for more than two decades.
Ammar Rashid
Ammar Rashid is a researcher, academic and political organiser associated with the All-Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis. He contributes regularly to the Daily Times and DAWN. He has taught at the Centre of Excellence for Gender Studies in Quaid-i-Azam University and the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics. He acquired a master’s degree from the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton. He also ran for the National Assembly seat NA-53 in the Islamabad capital territory against the current prime minister, Imran Khan, in the 2018 Pakistani general election.