HAVING stayed silent about urbanisation in Pakistan for many years, it seems we’ve reached a point where we’re referring to it all the time. A set of standard lines and buzzwords are replicated in every policy document, every presentation, every academic paper — Pakistan is the most urban country in the region; Pakistan will see rural-urban population parity in another decade and a half; Pakistan will have more than 100 million urban residents by 2030.

The quality of Pakistan’s urbanisation, however, has garnered less attention in a space otherwise populated by (mostly) empty sloganeering, and prosaic concerns about economic productivity, agglomeration effects, and good governance. Urbanisation, through its overall context and its allocation of resources, produces a distinct pattern of winners and losers, which, in turn, produces a distinct pattern of politics. These patterns — collectively known as a political settlement — are ultimately responsible for generating the type of compromise and conflict seen in cities.

Also read: Poverty, unemployment daunt urbanisation, says ADB

For any country undergoing a major urban transition, the overall sustenance of a democratic, functioning state will be contingent on the configuration and degree of conflict that emerges in its cities. This just happens to be basic common sense. Urbanisation increases demands, induces aspirations, and places fresh strain on scarce resources. In other words, it is programmed to produce conflict.

Sociologists first documented this over 50 years ago. After the rapid wave of urbanisation in the 1960s, racial inequality in access to housing, schooling, and health facilities, along with police heavy-handedness, gave birth to race riots in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. In the 1980s, deindustrialisation and privatisation under Thatcher gave rise to high unemployment in the cities of northern Britain, and as a consequence, resulted in some of the worst forms of ‘hooliganism’ and violence — the kind that regularly claimed lives every Saturday and Sunday night.

No one will voluntarily give up violence as long as everyone else is able to use it for some advantage.

What really spells out the permanence of urban conflict is that despite a country’s status as wealthy and developed, or the existence of highly effective CCTV states, violence still manages to rear its head from time to time. Ferguson, MO, last month and the London riots from a couple of years ago, bear testament to this reality.

These are stark examples from countries where political conflict is otherwise channelled through peaceful mechanisms. Political parties, civil society organisations, the presence of strong local government systems and heavy police states, all help in ensuring that the political settlement over resources, and the perpetuation of some form of inequality, remains non-violent.

Will that be the case for Pakistan, given its status as a weak, unequal state that’s well on its way to becoming very urban?

Let’s look at what the country’s two biggest cities — Karachi and Lahore — have to offer. Political settlement in Karachi, ie the current framework for resolving disputes, is more often than not a détente instigated by mutual deterrence and violence, as opposed to a compromise based on a shared vision for the city.

For the past three decades, political groups (stratified by ethnicity and religious affiliation) have been unable to find a stable equilibrium that does not include violence as an integral variable. Ordered disorder, as Laurent Gayer puts it so eloquently. Given the city’s complex history, it’s largely useless to pin the blame tail on any one donkey. The fact is that no one will voluntarily give up violence as long as everyone else is able to use it for some advantage.

On the other hand, Lahore’s comparatively more benign political settlement is a product of two factors — the first is the state’s gradual monopolisation of violence, and its control/influence over private actors capable of engaging in violence on their own.

The second, and more important one, is mostly accidental: nearly everyone is Punjabi. Without the ethnic fracturing found in cities like Mumbai or Karachi, and the absence of any meaningful class politics (rich vs poor), political conflict becomes internecine or dhara based. In other words, it takes the shape of PTI vs PML-N — a mostly vanilla competition playing itself out through furious tweeting, dinner table arguments, spam text messages, and bumper stickers saying ‘Go Nawaz Go’.

Both cities occupy a pole each on the spectrum of Pakistan’s urbanisation. Other emerging cities may not experience the extreme ethnic heterogeneity of Karachi, but they may also not be completely homogenous like Lahore. In other words, there is a very real chance that the political settlement, which eventually emerges in urban Pakistan, is based on violence as opposed to on non-violent means. Worryingly enough, we’re already seeing this reality in the growing cities of Peshawar and Quetta.

So is there a way out from what could well be a bleak situation marred by scarce resources and pervasive urban conflict? If economists were asked, they’d say improve governance and instigate high economic growth rates. Once the urban economy is growing, there’d be more to go around, and less reason to fight. Simply put, increase the size of the pie today, and worry about the size of the pieces later. On the other hand, sociologists and political scientists would add an important qualifier — conflict isn’t just going to go away with growth, it needs to be made non-violent through political consensus and stable institutions.

Out of all the reform choices facing decision-makers in Pakistan today, the one that could go farthest in mitigating urban conflict, and producing peaceful political settlements is the introduction of a functioning local government system. By devolving decision-making to the local level, and by making groups/parties/factions contest for power through formal, instead of informal means, cities in Pakistan could very well avoid a dystopian urban future. The time to take this much-needed step, however, is now rather than later.

The writer is a freelance columnist.

umairjaved@lumsalumni.pk

Twitter: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2014