Producing dispossessed and humanitarian subjects: land acquisition and compensation policies in Lahore, Pakistan

This article examines land acquisition for the construction of a metro train line in Lahore, Pakistan, to argue that the role and temporality of bureaucratic documentary practices are key to enabling urban informality and associated regimes of substantive citizenship. I examine the changing role of bureaucratic documents along the axes of (a) state and citizens, as documents are transferred between various actors who attribute different meanings to them; and (b) time, as documents assume varying meanings across their life cycles. First, I argue that documents constitute the disaggregated state and facilitate inconsistent practices that produce urban informality by exempting such settlements from some regulations while subjecting them to others. Second, a study of the time effects of these contingent practices and associated documentation shows that while original settlers may manipulate the disparate institutions of the state to secure resources, tolerance of such settlements across generations prompts a reformulation of local conceptions of landownership. Contemporary residents, then, position themselves as propertied citizens in possession of ownership documents. In this case of land acquisition, such efforts secured limited recognition from the state: residents were cast as illegal encroachers but were eventually offered some compensation as humanitarian aid, thereby reproducing socioeconomic inequalities.