Caste, Markets, and Surplus Populations: Disciplinary Urbanism in Lahore's Militarised Urban Frontier

Abstract

I propose the concept of disciplinary urbanism to capture the Pakistani military's economic, political, and spatial strategies driving urbanisation in the rural–urban frontier in Lahore. Firstly, disciplinary urbanism accounts for the financial, spatial, and coercive strategies for acquiring agricultural land on the urban frontiers. I show how agrarian caste and class relationships are central to accumulating land values through the market and how such transformations create a new class of relative surplus populations along the axis of class, caste, and gender. Secondly, disciplinary urbanism elucidates the extensive application of militarised architectural practices and spatial discipline to enclose state and common lands while controlling surplus populations. I examine the methods used to control, securitise, and capture land and labour and the tactics employed to counter the challenges posed by the informal economic and political activities of the surplus populations, which are controlled differentially based on class, caste, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship.