Can Money Compensate: Voices from the Periphery, Lahore

The research looks at the role of cash compensation for land in villages southeast of Lahore, which have witnessed rapid land acquisition for elite gated housing estates since the mid 1990’s. This development is primarily led by Defence Housing Authority (DHA) an iconic housing developer managed by the Pakistan army. The villages in the area have gone from being primarily sites of agrarian production and residence for diverse, multi-class populations to class segregated residential neighborhoods of the larger city of Lahore. It offers a simultaneous picture of transformation from villages to new urban space. At the two ends of this spectrum are those entirely obliterated from the landscape and those waiting in anticipation for the buyers to arrive. In the middle are villages turned into walled ghettoes amidst the new housing estate. It is an extended multi-sited ethnography in the area from 2014 to 2022 and offers an empirical record of perceptions, experiences and material changes in the area. Based on the findings it argues that the villagers have suffered a significant loss of intangibles rooted in the historical village ecology where many aspects of life were based on non-monetary exchange. Cash compensation introduced unprecedented liquidity into the cash poor environment of the villages. Those who sold land gained cash but suffered an irreversible loss of intangibles and for the landless there was only loss and no gains in the new ecology. This is research in villages at different stages of transformation and in new localities that many of the new cash rich have migrated to and with added attention to the experience of the females in this major ecological change. The loss of intangibles such as security, identity, and cultural capital for the already vulnerable, landless peasants, wage workers, elderly, females and children have not been recorded and theorised.