Land Commodification, Urbanisation and Social Change in Peri-Urban Villages, Lahore

Beschreibung

Peri-urban villages on the fringes of Lahore are on the frontlines of rapid transformation, where farmland is converted into real estate and expanding infrastructures redraw the boundaries of everyday life. While such change is often framed through displacement, inequality, and environmental decline, this book asks a different question: how is it experienced by those who live through it?

Based on eight years of multi-sited ethnographic research, it brings forward the voices of village communities navigating the quiet but profound unmaking of their social and ecological worlds. As cash economies take hold, gains in income and housing are accompanied by less visible losses – of trust, reciprocity, shared labour, ecological security, and belonging – forms of life that cannot be compensated or restored.

Revisiting Andre Gunder Frank’s theory of the development of underdevelopment, the book extends its insights to urban–rural frontiers and introduces the concept of internal underdevelopment: a process through which development itself produces new forms of vulnerability from within.

Through memory, narrative, and lived experience, nostalgia emerges not as sentiment but as a way of knowing – revealing what is lost when ways of life are remade in the name of progress. This book offers a powerful account of transformation at the edges of the city – and a critical rethinking of what development ultimately delivers.

Peri-urban villages on the fringes of Lahore are undergoing rapid socio-ecological transformation as agricultural landscapes give way to speculative real-estate development and expanding concrete frontiers. While similar processes are unfolding across the Global South, with parallels in parts of Latin America and Africa, a rich body of scholarship has examined these transformations through lenses, such as displacement, dispossession, urban inequality, informality, gentrification, land acquisition, infrastructure provision, environmental degradation, financialization, and related dynamics. Far less is known about how these transformations are lived and understood by village communities themselves as historically grounded and relational processes that unfold unevenly across space and time, particularly through changes in the intangible assets that shape quality of life.

This book brings forward the voices of those most affected yet least heard. Through the narratives of villagers navigating the intrusion of cash economies and infrastructure-led development, it traces the gradual unmaking of ecological, social, and cultural worlds that once anchored everyday life. These accounts complicate dominant assumptions about compensation and progress, revealing money as a pseudo-equalizer that obscures losses that cannot be priced, including land-based relations, trust, reciprocity, collective care, memory, and a sense of belonging rooted in shared ways of living.

Approaching peri-urban transformation through a political ecology lens, this book reworks Andre Gunder Frank’s theory of the development of underdevelopment beyond its classical formulation of core–satellite relations between nations. It shows how the same structural logic unfolds along urban–rural frontiers, where expanding cities operate as cores and villages are rendered their internal satellites. Underdevelopment here is not produced through extraction alone, but through the reorganization of deprivation as land, ecology, and social life are systematically reconfigured in the name of development.

This book argues that underdevelopment is neither purely economic nor external. It is lived, relational, and cumulative. As cash economies penetrate peri-urban villages, communities experience material inflows alongside the steady depletion of assets that once sustained collective resilience, including common land, livestock, reciprocal labour, trust, care, and ecological security. What had existed in abundance outside the market is gradually commodified, fragmented, or lost. Even where households move into larger homes or upscale developments, many come to recognize a deeper dispossession, marked by declining well-being, weakened social bonds, and growing dependence on markets for survival.

Through deeply grounded ethnographic engagement, this work advances the concept of ‘internal underdevelopment’, showing how development can make formerly resilient communities underdeveloped from within. It challenges the dismissal of nostalgia as mere sentiment, reframing it instead as an epistemic register through which villagers articulate what quality of life once meant and what has been irreversibly displaced in the pursuit of progress. At once a scholarly intervention and an act of preservation, this book documents the final moments of a dynamic agrarian way of life on the verge of erasure, offering a critical rethinking of development, well-being, and what it means to live well.

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Huda Javaid

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socio-ecological change peri-urban villages urbanization Lahore urban ecology

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