I. INTRODUCTIONHow do and underdevelopment intersect to influence urban population growth in Pakistan? This stark question often goes unexamined in literature on region. Analysts, duly in tune with conventional neoclassical approaches (see e.g., Burki, 2008; Hussain, 2004; Haq, 1973; Falcon and Papanek, 1971; McEwan, 1971), tend to dismiss underdevelopment and urban population growth as a temporal-spatial lag to be overcome by diffusion of development. Their uncritical allegiance to sequential model of development, as perceived by Rostow (1960), espoused a in Pakistan that turned out to be what James Galbraith famously called symbolic development (Peach, 2008), i.e., empty of substantive content. As a result, vertical accumulation reached a level that turned very architect of country's project, Mahbub-ul-Haq, into its fervent critic. In 1969, when Pakistan was busy celebrating Decade of Development (1959-69), Haq (1973) chastised it with his now fabled indictment that country's economy was in iron grip of 22 wealthy families that owned two-thirds of its industries, 80% of its banking and 79% of its insurance business. Several decades later, Cohen (2006) observed these 22 families widen into 500 ones that now dominate Pakistan's political economy.Yet privileged discourse on Pakistan has failed to make room for alternative critical perspectives that have been conspicuous by their absence from literature. The hegemony of neoclassical theories of economic and modernization perspectives have now mutated into neoliberal theories of capitalist development. Both sets of theories embrace unequal outcomes of early stages of capitalist expansion in well- contested belief that they will out in end. As early theorists of uneven and combined (e.g., Marx and Trotsky) argued, unequal outcomes of capitalist expansion are not an aberration, but inherent in capitalist pattern of (Bond, 1997). If this argument holds, which Marxist and neo-Marxist analysts say it does, then agency of state assumes epic significance in evening out process to benefit all segments of society. In Smith's (1982) persuasive formulation, perspectival goal of uneven and combined is not to seek a completely even outcome of development, but to address structural constraints that engender sectoral, spatial and class disparities in process. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to identify structural dynamics in uneven that triggered mass exodus of Pakhtuns from their native habitat of Kyhber-Pakhtunkhwa into Karachi. Perpetuation of these dynamics continues to keep Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa underdeveloped and Pakhtun out-migration the new normal.EMPIRICAL SETTINGThe empirical setting of this investigation is country's largest city of Karachi that is overdeveloped and overurbanized, and country's extremely underdeveloped province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa that brims with relative surplus population. With massive migration from underdeveloped regions, Karachi has overgrown to extent that it now houses half of Pakistan's urban population (Yusuf, 2012). Although decennial census has not been conducted since 1998, Karachi's population is estimated at 18 million (Yusuf, 2012), seven millions of whom are Pakhtuns (Obaid-Chinoy, 2009; National, 2009) from northern and southern Pakhtunkhwa. At seven million, Pakhtuns in Karachi outnumber their kin in Peshawar, Kandahar and Quetta combined, and equal almost one-third of total population of KhyberPakhtunkhwa (Government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 2012). Karachi's projected population of 27.5m by 2020 (Qureshi, 2010) will not only surmount total population of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa today, but make it second largest city in world. …