title: Can Money Compensate?  Land commodification, urbanisation and social change in peri-urban villages, Lahore
creator: Javaid, Huda
subject: ddc-300
subject: 300 Social sciences
subject: ddc-550
subject: 550 Earth sciences
subject: ddc-630
subject: 630 Agriculture
description: The dissertation looks at the role of cash compensation for land in villages southeast of Lahore, which have witnessed rapid land acquisition for elite gated housing estates since the mid 1990’s. This development is primarily led by Defence Housing Authority (DHA) an iconic housing developer managed by the Pakistan army. The villages in the area have gone from being primarily sites of agrarian production and residence for diverse, multi-class populations to class segregated residential neighbourhoods of the larger city of Lahore. The DHA development in the area has proceeded incrementally since it started in 1977. The research focuses on the area of explosive expansion of DHA which started in 1999. The villages in this area offered a simultaneous picture of different stages of transformation from villages to new urban space. At the two ends of this spectrum are those entirely obliterated from the landscape and those waiting in anticipation for the buyers to arrive. In the middle are villages turned into walled ghettoes amidst the new housing estate. The aggressive land use change in the name of development and fast-paced urbanization has looted the periphery in multiple ways, through complete removal of arable lands, scrapping of top soil, bringing graveyards to market followed by cultural impoverishment and loss of rural ecology. The research is an extended ethnography in the area from 2014 to 2022 that offers an empirical record of perceptions, experiences and material changes in the area. Based on the findings that are framed by the Frank’s epigram ‘development of underdevelopment’, it argues that the villagers have suffered a significant loss of intangibles rooted in the historical village ecology where many aspects of life were based on non-monetary exchange. Cash compensation introduced unprecedented liquidity into the cash poor environment of the villages. Those who sold land gained cash but suffered an irreversible loss of intangibles and for the landless there was only loss and no gains in the new ecology. This is multi-sited ethnographic research in villages at different stages of transformation and in new localities that many of the new cash rich have migrated to and with added attention to the experience of the females in this major ecological change.  The loss of intangibles such as security, identity, trust, reverence, interdependence and cultural capital for the already vulnerable, landless peasants, wage workers, elderly, females and children have not been recorded and theorised in the wide-ranging literature on socio-spatial transformation in South Asia.
date: 2025
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/36529/1/Can%20money%20compensate_.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00036529
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-365291
identifier:   Javaid, Huda  (2025) Can Money Compensate? Land commodification, urbanisation and social change in peri-urban villages, Lahore.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/36529/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng