Ever since taking office, the Pakistan Tehrrek-i-Insaf government has shown a deep interest in the real-estate sector. Cherishing the real estate industry, the government is further entrenching the nexus of politicians, planners and developers, which architect Arif Hasan regards as an arrangement to harm the urban poor.

On the pretext of housing the poor, the first-time officeholders have enacted a series of decisions to help real estate investors and land developers buy land and keep it for speculation in future. The peasants, the villagers, and the informal dwellers will remain at a loss seeing their lands converted into files and plots to be sold at much higher prices.

Profits as high as 40 to 100 percent on this land are likely to exclude even the middle-income families from a realistic chance to build or acquire a home. One wonders if the ordinary citizens will be forced to submit themselves to the whims of emerging speculative urbanization; if the handful of real estate investors and developers will dictate terms in Pakistan by commodifying every piece of land into property?

The real question is how quickly will this form of aggressive land speculation make us forget that cities are social and ecological commons allowing people to rise above their primordial instincts.

The unfolding reality of the large-scale land purchases by the emerging property tycoons is rapidly killing the grim hope of the survival of already damaged urban commons in the country.

Talk to the peasants around Lahore, Kasur, Sheikhupura, Multan, or Karachi, and they will share a story like this: “people are coming to us with boxes full of money and want to buy every inch we have.” The mention of “boxes full of money” is instructive.

Regarding real estate as a driver of urban development and embracing Western capitalistic engineering, i.e. financial capitalism, the Khan government is doing everything to help a small number of big developers accumulate money by owning land. The rising concern is if the accumulation of land by the private sector investors with the state facilitation leaves room to include the voices of the poor anywhere in the planning process.

Recent developments suggest that ordinary citizens will soon be subdued by the speculative land developers and their planning associates.

A tax amnesty was recently extended to the developers without asking them about the source of their money. Tax concessions have been given to the developers. There are one-window operations for investors and attractive packages have been announced for overseas Pakistanis to invest primarily in the real estate grant - a privilege to the business of land and its commodification at the cost of industrial capitalism and innovation that can promise prosperity to the ordinary people in Pakistan.

The unfolding reality of the large-scale land purchases by the emerging property tycoons is rapidly killing the grim hope of the survival of already damaged urban commons in the country.

The lands walked by the investors become expensive overnight forcing the ordinary citizens further away, even from the remote fringes of the city. This speculative land development process is likely to bring along forms of gentrification, laying new infrastructure (both public and private), stimulating the insatiable appetite for horizontal urban expansion, and breaking the already fragile community.

These changes are likely to deepen our social, economic, and ecological crises. This could further stifle the ordinary citizens and make them lose the little capacity they have to shape politics, democracy and institutions supposed to serve them.

As a panacea for our cities, the real estate model, which Khan has so far sold, is likely to reshape the Pakistani state as the current and future real estate investors would have it. The way various government agencies are selling real estate investment opportunities to the local as well as foreign investors by completely disregarding the majority of the local population belonging primarily to poor and middle-income backgrounds — may transform Pakistan into a “real estate state.”

The term may appear as another from the academic lexicon, but it resonates with our situation. In his recent book, Capital City, Samuel Stein has used it to significantly denote a state influenced by real estate capital and its owners.

The way Khan is ceding the power of politics, ordinary citizens’ ability to use politics for them, the power of the planning institutions to the profit motives of the real estate investors and planners associated with them is likely to integrate financial capitalism and real estate property. This integration is more likely to stifle the feeble process of industrial development, innovation and digital economies that also serve the ordinary.

As these processes of accumulation are strengthened, our cities will likely be reduced to real estates. It is also possible that the planners will work more enthusiastically on urban zone land to meet the real estate investors’ demands and not ordinary citizens.

In a few decades, ordinary citizens may be excluded from urban land in Pakistan as the zoning processes excluded the African-Americans from the American cities during the early 20th century. The exclusion in the US pushed an entire community to the ghettos and killed their chances of influencing politics. It is likely that as the poor are removed from the cities by making the land highly expensive, Pakistani cities may enter an era of speculative urbanism and may start losing their capacity to provide opportunities for cultural, social and other forms of urban commons that are essential to rise above the primordial and embrace democratic ways to negotiate and settle pressing problems — social, economic, political and ecological.

The question remains: are we ready to question the large-scale experiment of speculative urbanism designed and being conducted by Imran Khan? This could have far-reaching consequences for the ordinary Pakistani.

The writer is a scholactivist with Forman Christian College University and Punjab Urban Resource Centre in Lahore