Abstract
Looking at evolving urban governance and planning practices in the city of Lahore, Pakistan, the article aims to understand—from an Evolutionary Governance Theory perspective—to what extent these practices steer paths and modes of service provision and housing for low-income residents. With a focus on the endurance and transformations of urban governance practices and institutions, we first explore the influence of the changing development discourse and the impact it has had on the (re)configuration of urban governance and housing policies in Lahore. Second, drawing on extensive fieldwork and empirical data collected between 2012 and 2016, we highlight three vignettes depicting the development of different housing options for low-income residents in Lahore, i.e., a government-steered subsidised housing scheme, a privately developed ‘pro-poor’ settlement in the peri-urban fringe of the city, and residential colonies already—or in the process of being—regularised. By analysing the relationship between governance frameworks, the establishment of the three types of settlements and how residents manage to access housing and services there, we demonstrate how purposive deregulation in governance and policy generates a disconnect between urban normative frameworks (i.e., urban planning tools and pro-poor housing policies) and residents’ needs and everyday practices. We argue that this highly political process is not exclusively path-dependent but has also allowed the creation of liminal spaces based on agency and collective action strategies of low-income residents.
Highlights
When Pakistan was created in 1947, the city of Lahore typified differentiated urban qualities and socio‐ economic disparities in the planned civil station ver‐ sus indigenous settlements (Qadeer, 1983)
While path and goal dependencies structured the framework for pro‐poor housing policy implementation, this crucial phase was characterised by the interplay of power relations—actors negotiating the enforcement of their interests—that manifested in numerous interdependencies
Actor/institution configurations in Lahore pertaining to urban governance and low‐income hous‐ ing have changed over time with transforming polit‐ ical economies
Summary
When Pakistan was created in 1947, the city of Lahore typified differentiated urban qualities and socio‐ economic disparities in the planned civil station ver‐ sus indigenous settlements (Qadeer, 1983). By combining access theory with selective EGT con‐ cepts (e.g., non‐linear paths and dependencies), we extend EGT conceptually (Van Assche et al, 2014) and illustrate how an analysis of governance paths that accounts for the analysis of power relations that underly access mechanisms will reveal limits of steering (Van Assche & Verschraegen, 2008) and social engineer‐ ing. Planning perspectives—specific narratives, specific ways of read‐ ing, and managing socio‐spatial realities—tend to rein‐ force their own constructions of reality, existing power relations, and actor/institution configurations In doing so, they create path dependencies i.e., legacies of the past in different forms that affect governance evolu‐ tion over time, contribute to the rigidity of planning (Beunen et al, 2015; Van Assche et al, 2014) and con‐ strain its adaptation to an otherwise changing envi‐ ronment. The more lin‐ ear and homogeneous the vision of the future is—such as in modernisation paradigm in development theory— within a given actor/institution configuration, the less flexible and adaptable the governance framework will be, and the less able it is to shape non‐linear, alternative cre‐ ative paths to tackle context‐specific and emerging socio‐ spatial challenges
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