Political Economy of Expulsionary Urbanization: Subsumption and Estrangement of Spaces in Pakistan

1. Introduction

A plethora of studies has delineated at length how the neoliberal regime of accumulation has accentuated economic inequality in past three decades (see Neilson 2021; Wrenn 2016; Konstantinidis 2016; Fernandez 2015; Hewitson 2014). Although the neoliberal regime of accumulation has coincided with major urban transformations in the Global South, what remains relatively underexplored in this journal is how it produces and reproduces space in the context of the Global South. By building on the rich tradition of Marxian urban literature (see Chatterjee 2020, 2014; Balakrishnan 2019; Brenner and Schmid 2015; Sassen 2014; Harvey 2003; Arvidson 2008, 1995; Lefebvre 2000), this article attempts to fill this void by analyzing sociospatial processes against the backdrop of neoliberal reforms at the urban scale. To undertake this task, the article builds on Koechlin (2014) by developing a multidisciplinary approach, that is, synthesizing critical insights of human geography, sociology, and heterodox economics, to analyze processes of urban transformation. For the case study, the article focuses on one of the fastest urbanizing countries in South Asia: Pakistan. Urban development in Pakistan has become synonymous with the development of gated housing enclaves, locally known as housing societies, since the advent of neoliberal reforms. Gated housing enclaves—tantamount to cities within a city and built at urban peripheries through displacement of the marginalized groups from their land and livelihoods—offer homes/villas, shopping malls, restaurants, parks, zoos, and many other amenities within the walls of an exclusive gated community. The article refers to this phenomenon as “expulsionary urbanization” where marginalized groups are not only dispossessed and displaced from their spaces but also expulsed and excluded from the newly produced urban spaces.

Neoliberal reforms—Pakistan’s National Housing Policy (NHP) 2001 is identified as a major steppingstone toward the expansion of neoliberal reforms in the urban sector because it strengthened deregulation, privatization, financialization, and market-friendly changes in land acquisition and tenancy laws—played a critical role in processes of expulsionary urbanization. To state the obvious, austerity and fiscal constraints imposed by the IMF’s neoliberal structural adjustment programs have contributed toward the crisis of inadequate provision of basic public amenities (e.g., piped-water connections, paved streets, streetlights, undisrupted supply of power, and public parks) in urban spaces. On the one hand, it has facilitated the rise of gated housing enclaves as they become more attractive living and investment spaces for intermediate- and high-income segments of the society. On the other hand, vulnerabilities of the marginalized groups at urban peripheries have accentuated as they are exposed to a series of dispossession and displacements. The expulsionary regime of urban development is nurtured and reproduced by a strong nexus of actors—real estate developers, politicians, and top civil-military bureaucrats—and their political and economic interests are consolidated at the expense of marginalized groups and the environment. ¹

By building on Sassen (2014) and Chatterjee (2014), the article conceptualizes expulsionary urbanization as a combination of two interrelated processes: (1) subsumption of space and (2) spatial estrangement. The article centralizes the role of spatial reconfiguration and commodification in processes of expulsionary urbanization by drawing from the core insights of Sassen (2014); that is, capital tends to be more interested in commanding space than in securing labor power in the neoliberal epoch. To delineate how processes of spatial reconfiguration and commodification produce winners and losers, the article reintroduces the conceptual category of “subsumption of space” by capital. Subsumption of space explains the extent and forms in which space is integrated into processes of the valorization of capital. For the purpose of analytical clarity, processes of subsumption of space by capital are subdivided into two: (1) formal subsumption, and (2) real subsumption. The formal subsumption implies that space has a latent potential to be commodified, but it has not been materialized yet, ² for example, common land, peripheral land used for subsistence farming, forests, and so forth. ³ To capture this latent potential, spatial reconfiguration (production and reproduction of new spaces) is needed and, in this process, marginalized groups of people tend to get dispossessed and displaced. This process of actualizing latent potential of commodification is called the real subsumption of space by capital. ⁴ Once the real subsumption of space is materialized, it opens up new avenues for the valorization of capital. For example, land’s tradable paper claims can be exchanged on the market, and land can be transformed into “a form of fictitious capital and be treated as an open field for the circulation of interest-bearing capital” (Harvey 2006: 371). In other words, actualization from formal to real subsumption of space transforms land into a form of fictitious capital, ⁵ and in this process marginalized groups of people are displaced from their spaces. To develop a Marxian understanding of processes of displacement, the article draws from Chatterjee (2014) who makes a significant contribution to the literature by bringing to the fore the spatial injustice embedded in processes of displacement: “spatial estrangement.” That is, displacement produces “alienation or estrangement of laboring people from spaces of their existence; it, therefore, robs laboring people of their right to produce their own spatial history” (Chatterjee 2014: 81). Thus, processes of expulsionary urbanization in Pakistan—creation of gated housing enclaves—are predicated on the theft of space where one class or group of people “accumulates and manages space by usurping it from those who produced it” (Chatterjee 2014: 81). In other words, expulsionary urbanization is a dialectic of subsumption and estrangement of spaces.

The rest of the article is structured as follows. Section 2 contextualizes urban processes against the backdrop of the neoliberal regime of accumulation. Section 3 delineates the political economic context in which gated housing enclaves are tied to processes of accumulation and displacement in Pakistan. Building on the empirical insights, section 4 introduces the notion of expulsionary urbanization. Section 5 concludes the article.

2. Urbanization in the Age of Neoliberalism

Historically, the production of new urban spaces has been an integral component of capitalist development, but its centrality to processes of capital accumulation has increased substantially under the neoliberal regime of accumulation. ⁶ Therefore, it is important to specify how urban processes have changed since the advent of neoliberal reforms in the Global South. Early urbanized countries of the Global North offer the counterfactual to neoliberal experiences of late urbanizing countries in the Global South. Mainstream urban economics literature explains early processes of urbanization in countries of the Global North in terms of transition to modernity and progress where urbanization is understood as a by-product of industrialization (Glaeser 2013). That is, introduction of new production techniques allowed countries of the Global North to produce large surpluses in the agriculture sector and subsequently went through industrialization and urbanization (Fox 2012). Rural-to-urban migration played a central role in this urban process; that is, expectation of higher wages in the “urban” industry attracted people from rural areas to cities. Two important things are to be noted in these urban processes. One, it ensured a continuous supply of labor to industry, and second, it kept a downward pressure on wages in industry. Thus, the capitalist class (industrialists in particular) did not only amass profits, but they were also incentivized by the state to reinvest their capital to expand production capabilities of their national economies (see Chang 2003). Over time through hard-fought collective struggles at the workplace, workers were able to secure better working and living conditions in the urban sector. In this context, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) have used the magnitude of urbanization as a proxy to measure levels of economic development.

But when it comes to experiences of developing countries under neoliberal policies, barring few exceptions, conventional wisdom that urbanization and industrialization go hand in hand is unfounded. ⁷ The reality of contemporary urbanization in countries of the Global South is starkly different from that of early industrialized countries (it can be also understood as urbanization under a Fordist regime of accumulation). Since the beginning of neoliberal economic reforms, a large number of developing countries (e.g., countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia) have witnessed urbanization without industrialization (see Fox 2012). This is directly tied to the prevailing neoliberal regime of accumulation, which has opened up new avenues for the financialization, deregulation, privatization, and obsession with austerity and free markets ⁸ (de Kadt 2016; Harvey 2003; Davis 2006). There is bourgeoning empirical evidence that shows that the neoliberal policies in the Global South have accelerated processes of agrarian distress, premature deindustrialization, and ecological degradation (see Balakrishnan 2019; D. Khan and Karak 2018; Andreucci et al. 2017; Rodrick 2015; Fox 2012; Vakulabharanam 2005). In other words, it is not industrialization (growth in manufacturing) per se that is driving processes of urbanization in large parts of the Global South. Therefore, it is important to analyze the concrete political economic modalities through urban spaces as expanding and facilitating processes of capital accumulation. The article undertakes this task by focusing on a case study of Pakistan in the next section.

3. Urban Transformation in Pakistan

Pakistan, with a total population of 225 million, is the fastest urbanizing country in South Asia and the fifth most populous country of the world (PBS 2021; see supplementary figure S1 in the appendix). Depending on how the “urban” is defined ⁹ or conceptualized, the share of Pakistan’s urban population is estimated between 37 and 64 percent of the total population (PBS 2021; World Bank 2014). Pakistan is an interesting case study because on the economic front it has consistently implemented the package of neoliberal reforms such as privatization, financialization, deregulation, and withdrawal of state subsidies since 1990 (Zaidi 2014). In the urban sphere, neoliberal policies picked up pace in 2001 through the promulgation of a new National Housing Policy (NHP 2001). It marked an important juncture in processes of urban development by consolidating neoliberal reforms in urban land markets. NHP 2001 accelerated the processes of privatization, financialization, and deregulation in land markets. In particular, it has promoted the “private sector to build housing schemes” (gated housing enclaves) and shifted the focus of government policies to facilitation of private real estate developers and investors by providing them fiscal incentives such as tax breaks, tax holidays, duty exemptions, and preferential access to credit (NHP 2001: 8). Prior to the NHP 2001, the house financing was solely provided through a state-owned entity, House Building Finance Company. It has facilitated the financialization of urban land and housing sectors by encouraging private banks to “float long term bonds at market rates to raise housing finance” (NHP 2001: 9). Moreover, public and private banks were required by NHP 2001 to earmark a higher share of percentage of their loan portfolio for housing. Interestingly, banks were required to allocate the same level of loanable funds for real estate development as they would for industrial projects. Moreover, the urban sector was opened up for foreign investors, and Pakistan witnessed a substantial inflow of capital from foreign investors in land and real estate markets for the first time (Haider 2018). To ensure the continuous supply of land for urban development, NHP (2001: 7) removed the “procedural and legal bottlenecks in the [land] acquisitions process. . . to minimize litigation.” Further, it promised investors that the “tenancy laws shall be reviewed and rationalized to promote housing through investment” (NHP 2001: 10). In short, the NHP 2001 has led to an unprecedented growth of gated housing enclaves in Pakistan. ¹⁰

In the past two decades, gated housing enclaves have become one of the most effective instruments of accumulating wealth, power, and influence in Pakistan. Processes of urban development have produced a new breed of super-rich elites (real estate developers and big real estate investors) whose influence has grown exponentially not only over Pakistan’s economy but also on politics, media, and civil-military bureaucracies (Akhtar and Rashid 2021). Here it is important to foreground the rise of gated housing enclaves in the context of broader political economics of development. Basic public goods and amenities such as paved streets, sewerage system, trash removal, piped water connections, uninterrupted supply of electricity, and neighborhood parks are inadequately and unevenly provisioned by the state authorities. ¹¹ In other words, there is a huge urban infrastructural gap in Pakistani cities, and the gated housing enclaves claim to fill this gap. Gated housing enclaves offer basic infrastructural goods and amenities by charging a premium fee to its residents. The state has recused itself from its primary role of providing basic infrastructural goods in urban spaces, and the private developers make big bucks from the government’s failure. Therefore, the growth of gated housing enclaves cannot be seen in isolation from the withdrawal of the state from its developmental role and the rise of austerity. Further, I argue that instead of systemically addressing the root causes of this issue, gated housing enclaves offer a temporary “spatial fix” as they create a spatial apartheid where affluent segments of the society (high-income and intermediate classes) build their own exclusive and securitized spaces at the expense of the wider society.

Generally, land tends to be an important factor in different forms of production, but its significance cannot be overstated for the gated housing enclaves. Developing new gated housing enclaves requires a supply of large tracts of land at low prices. To state the obvious, such land is rarely available in already-developed urban centers. ¹² Therefore, real estate capital goes outward toward peripheries of the city to secure the land. In other words, valorization of capital is predicated on securing access to land and by configuring its spatiality. Real estate developers have converted erstwhile farm, forest land, and common land on urban peripheries into gated housing enclaves by dispossessing and displacing historically disadvantaged groups (Ali 2021; Express Tribune 2020). It has produced an unprecedented urban sprawl, or what Brenner and Schmid (2015) have called an “extended urbanization,” that is, an outward expansion of the urban from its core-agglomerated centers. Geographic Information System (GIS) and night light intensity data show that the built-up environment at peripheries of urban centers in Pakistan has increased substantially in the past two decades (see supplementary tables 1 and 2 in the appendix). Islamabad (capital of Pakistan) has witnessed an exponential growth in the number of gated housing enclaves (see figure 1). Similarly, the largest urban center in Punjab province, Lahore, has witnessed unprecedented sprawl on erstwhile farmland since 2001. It is estimated that built-up areas (primarily gated housing enclaves) have increased by 24 percent between 2000 and 2020 on erstwhile agricultural and barren land in Lahore (Fahad et al. 2021: 6).

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Figure 1.

Gated Housing Enclaves are growing at an exponential rate since early 2000s.

Displacement is at the heart of the production of gated housing enclaves. Farmlands, green spaces, and forests are being engulfed, and people are being dispossessed and displaced to produce new enclaved spaces. Displacement is facilitated by a nexus of influential real estate developers, top civil-military bureaucrats, and local politicians. In Karachi, the largest urban center of Pakistan, hundreds of new gated housing enclaves have sprung up at urban peripheries in the past two decades (see figure 2 and supplementary figure S2 in the appendix). Most notable housing enclaves are Bahria Town and Defense Housing Authority (they exist in almost every major city of Pakistan), which are built fifty-six kilometers northeast of Karachi’s urban core. They cover 93 square kilometers and 55 square kilometers, respectively. In order to make way for these gated enclaves, thousands of local villagers must be displaced from their land and livelihoods (Ali 2021; Anwar 2018: 47). The following excerpt is from a 2016 judgment of a five-member bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan (the highest court in Pakistan) in a land acquisition case against Bahria Town: ¹³

In our society, the acts of illegal dispossession are largely committed at the behest of persons who are rich, powerful feudal lords, politicians, builders, government functionaries, or persons who head large communities [gated housing enclaves], and on account of their influence and power that place them in domineering positions either over their fellow community members or over less powerful communities living in an area of their influence. (excerpt from a Supreme Court of Pakistan judgment, quoted in H. Malik 2016)

In Karachi alone, 600,000 people have been displaced between 1997 and 2020 in the name of urban development (see figure 3). ¹⁴ Because of data limitations, it is hard to find the exact numbers of displaced people across Pakistan. ¹⁵

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Figure 2.

Gated Housing Enclaves are growing at an exponential rate since early 2000s.

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Figure 3.

Number of people displaced in Karachi since 1997.

One useful proxy ¹⁶ to gauge the extent of displacement is incidences of court litigation on land acquisition issues for gated housing enclaves. For example, in Lahore there are at least eighteen thousand court cases over issues of urban land acquisition. Interestingly, 56 percent of these cases are connected to Lahore Defense Housing Authority (DHA), which is one of the largest gated housing enclaves in the country (World Bank 2020: 62).

There is also a localized element of financial ingenuity in the operation of gated housing enclaves as land is first traded in the market via a system of files. The term file is used here for the tradable paper claim on piece of land (plot) backed by the gated housing enclave. File is not an actual title or registry of a particular plot of land; rather, it is simply a future claim that an “x” plot of land of the given size will be allocated once the gated housing enclave is able to develop the land. Files are the primary instrument of speculation as they allow the gated housing enclaves to sell tradable claims of land even before fully developing the land. From the Marxian perspective, files allow real estate developers to transform land into a form of fictitious capital. There is a whole informal market of buying and selling of the “file” that can be conceptualized as financialization of the plots as it is primarily based on speculation. The financial instrument of the file allows real estate developers to extract huge profits even without delivering any final output ¹⁷ (developed land with paved streets and roads in a gated housing enclave).

DHA is a classic example of extracting rents through files. DHA is not only one of the largest and influential real estate developers in Pakistan but also part of the military’s commercial enterprise (Army Welfare Trust), which is run by top serving and retired military officers. This gives DHA nonmarket power over other real estate developers as the military is not just a strategic national institution but also one of the most powerful political-economic actors in Pakistan (D. Khan 2021; Anwar 2012). In August 2008, DHA launched a new gated housing project called DHA Valley in Islamabad in partnership with another influential and powerful real estate developer of the country: Bahria Town Pvt Limited. In less than one year, DHA Valley sold files worth at least Rs. 62 billion, but as of May 2021 land had not been developed or handed over to those who had duly paid for it. It shows that even the most successful real estate developers, like DHA or Bahria town, are not interested in fulfilling the social need of housing; instead, they are primarily interested in transforming land into a form of fictitious capital to extract rents (Akhtar and Rashid 2021).

While the government of Pakistan has generally withdrawn itself from the provision of basic public goods to working class neighborhoods, but it provides all the necessary support to the gated enclaves from the exchequer. In particular, the expansion of road networks (e.g., signal-free highways, bridges, underpasses, and overpasses) helps commercial viability of gated housing enclaves by connecting them with core urban centers. ¹⁸ Not surprisingly, one of the highest budget allocations in Pakistan’s Public Sector Development Programme has been consistently reserved for the construction of road networks (Haque 2015). Of course, there are some positive externalities of infrastructural (road) development, but in the context of Pakistani cities it tends to disproportionately favor real estate developers and high-income households because of the following factors. One, private car ownership is limited to affluent segments of the society. For example, in one of the richest urban centers of Pakistan, Lahore, only 16 percent of households have private cars and 40 percent of all urban trips are nonmotorized, that is, by bicycles or walking (A. Malik 2015: 164). Traveling via bicycle or walking is not necessarily done for health or environmental reasons but because of a lack of affordability of motorized vehicles in Pakistan. Despite these facts, 58 percent of infrastructural spending programs are dedicated toward the development of roads in Lahore (A. Malik 2015: 164).

At this juncture, it is important to ask, Where does the demand for land in gated housing enclaves come from? This is an important question because securing (appropriating) land on urban peripheries is only the first step because real estate developers cannot realize profits unless they find a buyer who is willing to purchase it at a higher price. Who buys land in newly created gated housing enclaves? First and foremost, low-income and working classes are being priced out of the gated housing enclaves. Second, credit or mortgage financing cannot alone explain the growing demand of land in gated housing enclaves, because the share of urban land/home mortgage in total GDP of Pakistan is less than 1 percent (News 2016). Thus, I would like to bring attention to four important channels that help explain the demand side of the gated housing enclaves. First, Pakistani diaspora in North America, Europe, and the Middle East/Gulf countries play an important role by providing the necessary liquidity to land markets of gated housing enclaves. In almost every high-end gated housing enclave, plots are specially designated for “overseas Pakistanis,” and remittances have seen an exponential increase in the past two decades (see figure 4). To add a caveat here, I am not claiming that gated housing enclaves are the sole driving force behind the exponential rise in remittances to Pakistan, which can also be tied to legal and cultural changes outside Pakistan (Global North and Gulf countries) in the aftermath of the incidents of 9/11. For example, strict regulations on the use of informal channels to remit money to Pakistan may have led to the use of formal channels, and the rise in remittances might be partly reflecting this change.

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Figure 4.

Substantial increase in remittances since early 2000s.

Second, the officer cadres of the postcolonial state of Pakistan—civil-military bureaucracies and judiciary—get land grants as a part of their compensation package, and this plays an important role in producing and reproducing a continuous demand for land in gated housing enclaves. Here, I am not talking about the top generals of the military (who are also tied to the supply side of the gated housing enclaves through AWT) but a large group of the middle strata of the officer cadre. This is directly tied to the colonial heritage of the Pakistani state and society—the British colonial state in India offered land grants to civil-military bureaucrats for serving the interests of the metropolitan capital. Not only has this colonial path dependency remained intact, but it has achieved new heights in the postcolonial period in Pakistan (D. Khan and Akhtar 2022). Third, there has been a steady growth in the intermediate classes ¹⁹ (excluding families of diaspora and the military’s officer cadres) in Pakistan who tend to live and invest in gated housing enclaves. ²⁰

Lastly, socioeconomic and environmental sustainability ²¹ of the contemporaneous form of urban development is going to be a major issue in coming years. As remittances tend to provide a lifeline to the urban real estate sector. And a substantial share of remittances come from the oil-rich Gulf countries, yet a transition to renewable energy sources at the global level—much needed to slow down rising temperatures—can have a substantially negative impact on the demand side and the liquidity of the urban real estate sector in Pakistan because the majority of the Pakistani workforce in Gulf countries is employed in fossil fuel–related industries and services. Growth of gated housing enclaves has produced an unprecedented sprawl across cities in Pakistan and has led to massive expansion of road networks that connect peripheral gated housing enclaves to core-centers. Generally, sprawl tends to have negative environmental and health impacts on society as green spaces and trees are being replaced by concrete. Consequently, air pollution has increased multifold in the past two decades, and major Pakistani cities have some of the worst air qualities in the region. As a result, already city authorities are forced to shut down schools so that children can remain indoors to avoid smog. Further, Pakistan is among the most water-scarce countries in the world, and urban sprawl tends to accentuate the water crisis. The rapid pace of sprawl is likely to worsen the situation of food insecurity in Pakistan as farmlands are being rapidly converted into gated enclaves (Express Tribune 2020). ²² Around 44 percent of working people in Pakistan are tied to the agriculture sector, but as urban sprawl continues to engulf farmlands, the future of agrarian farm workers and peasants seems bleak in the absence of decent employment opportunities in the non-agricultural sectors. ²³ Heterodox economics literature has shown both theoretically and empirically the negative impact of the rise in guard labor (see Jayadev and Bowles 2006), and currently Pakistani cities are witnessing a rapid increase in guard labor across the urban sector but particularly in the gated housing enclaves. In addition to negative economic externalities associated with the issue of guard labor, it explicitly makes visible the spatial apartheid, that is, the divide between the “insiders” (residents of gated housing enclaves) and the “outsiders” (working classes).

4. Expulsionary Urbanization: Estrangement and Subsumption of Spaces

Building on the empirical insights from the case study of Pakistan, I argue that processes of urban development can be best understood as a form of “expulsionary urbanization.” That is, the lower orders of the society are not only being dispossessed and displaced from their land/livelihoods, but they are also being excluded from the newly produced urban spaces (gated housing enclaves). By drawing from theoretical contributions of Sassen (2014) and Chatterjee (2014), the article explains expulsionary urbanization in the context of the following two interrelated processes: (1) spatial estrangement and (2) subsumption of space. Displacement—processes of enclosure and dispossession—played an instrumental role in the early industrialization of the Global North, and they remain central in the context of the contemporary processes of development in the Global South. But as the case study of Pakistan illustrates, the contemporaneous processes of dispossession and displacement tend to be qualitatively distinct from what Marx ([1867] 1977) had envisaged as “primitive accumulation” in the context of Western Europe. In the context of early industrialized countries in the Global North, primitive accumulation was centered on two interrelated processes: (1) the separation of noncapitalist producers from their means of production/subsistence, that is, displacement of peasants, artisans, and petty commodity producers from their land/livelihoods; and (2) the proletarianization of the dispossessed and displaced segments of the population as they were absorbed by capital through wage-labor relations (see Gillespie 2016). In the context of contemporary postcolonial social formations such as Pakistan, processes of dispossession/displacement and proletarianization tend to be decoupled. ²⁴ In other words, capital tends to be primarily interested in restructuring space rather than securing labor power for its valorization:

One brutal way of putting it is to say that the natural resources of much of Africa, [Asia], and good parts of Latin America count more than the people on those lands count as consumers and as workers. I see this as part of this systemic deepening of advanced capitalist relations of production. (Sassen 2010: 26)

Sassen (2014) contextualized “expulsions” against the backdrop of changes in the global regime of accumulation from Fordism to neoliberalism. The former relied on the “inclusion” ²⁵ of lower and middle orders of society as workers and consumers in processes of economic development—whereas the latter treats lower orders of the society as “temp” workers or “surplus” population. In other words, it thrives on excluding the lower orders of society not only from their means of subsistence but also from the formal sectors of the economy. ²⁶ Thus, we can interpret processes of dispossession and displacement in Pakistan as expulsions. Although Sassen’s (2014) work on expulsions is not specific to urban spaces, I emphasize here that the expulsions are intricately tied to sociospatial reconfigurations as the new urban built environment is created by displacing historically disadvantaged groups. ²⁷ To explain the dialectical relationship between expulsions and spatial reconfiguration, particularly at the urban scale, I draw from Chatterjee’s (2014) Marxian theory of displacement. ²⁸ She forwards an extremely useful concept of “estranged spaces” in the light of Marx’s concept of estranged labor. Estranged spaces make visible the fact that the displaced person becomes “more landless and more placeless the more land and more places s/he produces in pre-capitalist, capitalist, and late capitalist contexts. Displacement can, therefore, be conceptualized as estranged spaces” (Chatterjee 2014: 59). Here it is important to point out that Chatterjee (2014) is building on the concept of socially produced space; that is, human labor activities produce space (see Lefebvre 2000). The concept of estranged space centralizes the often overlooked aspects of displacement: that displacement is not just a separation from the means of subsistence, but that those affected are inextricably denied the right to produce their own space. Processes of urban development in Pakistan—creation of gated housing enclaves—are therefore simultaneously producing affluence for privileged segments of society and spatial estrangement for the marginalized groups: ²⁹

Estrangement from space is estranged existence; it means that the very space humans produced through the act of laboring that defined her/him, that sustained and produced her/him, must be detached from her/his species being to be reclaimed by others who had no part in the production of space. (Chatterjee 2014: 60)

Chatterjee’s (2014) theory of displacement allows us to see that spatial estrangement is not an aberration but rather an engine of growth for the contemporary form of capitalist urban development in Pakistan. Under expulsionary urbanization, “a certain section of society must, therefore, continuously give up space and hence their very existence to another” (Chatterjee 2014: 60). In other words, expulsionary urbanization highlights how one section (class) of society appropriates spaces from another. Expulsionary urbanization therefore accentuates the crisis of spatial estrangement for working classes and other historically disadvantaged groups: “a postmodern move to globalize, therefore, requires reclaiming urban spaces previously locked up as public land or commons and transforming them such that they can fix global capital” (Chatterjee 2014: 50).

To delineate how production of new spaces facilitate accumulation, the article reintroduces the conceptual category of “subsumption of space” by capital. The concept of subsumption of space draws its inspiration from Marx’s ([1867] 1977) notion of subsumption of labor ³⁰ by capital (see Das 2012). Subsumption of space by capital is a useful analytical category to explain the extent and forms in which space is integrated into processes of capital accumulation. Mizuoka (1991: 72) had first presented the concept of subsumption of space to analyze processes of capitalist development: ³¹

The process of incorporating pristine space with all its attributes into the pristine, “one-point” concept of human society and the emergence of concomitant contradiction-laden social processes may be termed the formal subsumption of space. . . . Human society having subsumed pristine space then transforms it into configuration of socioeconomic space, suitable for the operation of human society, through intentional applications of labor and science and technology, and the creation of new social relations. The latter are processes towards the real subsumption of space into society.

By extending Mizuoka’s (1991) work, this article differentiates between two distinct forms of subsumption of space by capital, namely, formal and real subsumption. Formally subsumed space ³² is one that has a latent potential for commodification, but it is not fully commodified yet, for example, common land, land used for subsistence farming, forests, and so forth. ³³ To materialize this latent potential from the formally subsumed space, sociospatial restructuring is needed. In other words, land needs to be commodified, commercialized, and its tradable paper claims must be created. By drawing from Harvey’s work on land markets and fictitious capital, I argue that real subsumption of space is materialized when land becomes “a form of fictitious capital and is treated as an open field for the circulation of interest-bearing capital” (Harvey 2006: 371). In other words, “title to the land becomes, in short, a form of fictitious capital” (Harvey 2006: 367, emphasis in original). It facilitates financialization of land and open avenues for speculative activities on land.

The distinction between formal and real subsumption of land by capital is extremely useful to analyze urban processes in postcolonial social formations such as Pakistan where diverse forms of tenure arrangement exist, including community/collective ownership and use of land, subsistence farming, and state ownership of land. The case study of expulsionary urbanization in Pakistan shows that through “the appropriation of values, landholders can force production on the land into new configurations [farmland/forests turned into gated housing enclaves]. . . [and t]reat the land as a pure financial asset” (Harvey 2006: 368). Expulsionary urbanization brings “new” land under the command and control of real estate capital by expanding outward (urban sprawl) and dispossessing people from their land. It is worth pointing out that expulsionary urbanization is not simply about appropriation of land or change in landownership, but it also brings about the change in land use from subsistence farming/forests to commercial real estate use, for example, creation of high-end gated housing enclaves. In other words, the underlying drive of capital to valorize itself leads to (1) spatial estrangement of the marginalized groups from their land/livelihoods and (2) transition from formal to real subsumption of space. In short, processes of expulsionary urban development in Pakistan can be summarized by the inner dialectic of subsumption and estrangement of space by capital. Further, in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom that the role of the state is passive under the neoliberal regime of accumulation, the article has shown that the postcolonial state plays an integral role in processes of expulsionary urbanization by actively engineering new ground rents via its infrastructural policy.

5. Conclusion

Since the advent of neoliberal reforms, many countries of the Global South have witnessed an unprecedented rise in urbanization without necessarily going through processes of industrialization. As a result, the significance of the production and reconfiguration of spaces has become more pronounced for processes of capital accumulation. Building on the case study of Pakistan, this article has critically analyzed the dynamic interplay between processes of capital accumulation and spatial production and reconfiguration at the urban scale in the neoliberal period. Establishment and growth of gated housing enclaves—the concept of an exclusive gated city within the city—have been one of the most defining features of Pakistan’s urban development in the past two decades. On the one hand, it has allowed the privileged few to amass huge wealth; on the other hand, it has led to large-scale displacement of historically disadvantaged segments of the society. To make theoretical sense of these processes, the article synthesized concepts of “expulsions” (Sassen 2014) and “spatial estrangement” (Chatterjee 2014) to forward the notion of “expulsionary urbanization.” Expulsionary urbanization emphasizes that capital is primarily interested in the real subsumption (commodification) of space, and that is why it is engulfing spaces at urban peripheries by dispossessing and displacing historically disadvantaged groups from their land. Marginalized groups are not just dispossessed, but they are also displaced and alienated from their own spaces and conditions of existence, that is, spatial estrangement. In other words, valorization of capital under expulsionary urbanization—a dialectic of subsumption and estrangement of spaces—is predicated on the theft of space. Advantages and disadvantages associated with processes of expulsionary urbanization are conferred on different groups of the society based on their class positions and access to state resources. For example, real estate developers, state elites (civil-military bureaucracies), and high-income segments of the society have benefited from processes of expulsionary urbanization at the expense of working classes and the environment. This article has shown that the role of the postcolonial state is central in processes of expulsionary urbanization because it has not only absolved itself from the universalized provision of basic urban amenities that creates room for privatized housing enclaves, but it has also actively facilitated dispossession and displacement of historically disadvantaged groups through the promulgation of the National Housing Policy 2001. As a result, urban spaces in Pakistan are silos of affluence (gated housing enclaves) for the privileged few and perpetual insecurity and misery for the rest of the society.