Tassadiq, F. orcid.org/0000-0002-6409-3168 (2024) Colonial laws, postcolonial infrastructures: Land acquisition, urban informality, and politics of infrastructural development in Pakistan. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 42 (3). pp. 401-421. ISSN 0263-7758
Abstract
This article traces (dis)continuities in colonial logics across disjunctures of decolonisation and democratisation through a large infrastructure project in contemporary Lahore, Pakistan. Analysing Lahore’s Orange Line Metro Train, a project constructed under China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the article shows how colonial extractive and racial logics can limit the redistributive potential of typically inclusive infrastructures like mass transit by continuing to shape the conditions of their development and (re)producing precarious configurations of citizenship in the postcolony. It finds that Pakistan’s colonial-era land acquisition law erased a range of land relations and rights from recognition and thus compensation by the state. In an instance of informal policy making, the state eventually created an ad hoc ‘grant-in-aid’ scheme to compensate landowners in informal settlements. However, the scheme continued the property centric politics of recognition embedded in the expropriation law by only compensating people with long-term land claims. The public script of the scheme invoked welfare obligations of the state but structured these through moral-legal norms of property. The postcolonial state thus bypassed the transition from colonial subjects to citizens and instead repositioned people as humanitarian subjects. The article thus highlights the contradictions of developing subsidized public infrastructure in postcolonial cities, where construction becomes another conduit of imposing land commodification and disciplining pro-poor self-built neighbourhoods that have escaped the rigidity of private property.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | infrastructures; colonialism; urban informality; citizenship; land rights; China Pakistan Economic Corridor; Belt and Road Initiative |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 Jun 2024 10:52 |
Last Modified: | 14 Jun 2024 10:52 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/02637758241240363 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:213321 |