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

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.

Huda Javaid is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Development Studies at the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. With an MPhil in Environmental Science and Policy from the Lahore School of Economics and a PhD in Human Geography from Heidelberg University, Germany―as a DAAD scholar―Javaid’s research is rooted in long-term ethnographic work in peri-urban Lahore. This work explores how land commodification and urban expansion, while introducing a cash influx that fuels speculative real estate, can have diverse impacts on local communities. Rather than focusing solely on the physical manifestations of change, the research aims to unpack the balance of losses and gains, questioning what constitutes progress or development, and for whom. It highlights the role of intangible assets in shaping quality of life and examines how these processes transform ecologies, livelihoods, and social structures. Javaid’s academic interests center on the state–society–environment relationship and on amplifying the voices of communities navigating the often overlooked costs of development.