Metropolitan areas: the new face of urban Pakistan

The easiest way to know that something big is changing in Pakistan’s urban geography is by looking at what happened to Raiwind.

In the 1990s, Raiwind was famous for being the site of the Tablighi Jamaat’s annual ijtima. As a young boy, whenever I asked somebody where Raiwind was, the answer was always: “It is somewhere outside Lahore”.

Raiwind today is not outside Lahore. It is very much a part of Lahore and feels like it, even though it was once so far out that it was described as not being part of the city at all. And the numbers show exactly why that is. In the 1998 census, Raiwind had a population of just over 27,000 people. As of the 2023 census, it had 1.1 million people. Raiwind alone is as big as Islamabad, and bigger than Sialkot or Bahawalpur.

In sheer scale, it is one of the largest and fastest growing parts of urban Pakistan. But it is far from being alone. Parts of Pakistani cities that were once deemed to be “the outskirts” of cities or even rural areas are now completely connected parts of those cities and changing the very definition of what it means to be from those cities.

They are introducing to Pakistan something that was first invented in post-World War II United States: the metropolitan area.

The boundary between city and village is never completely sharp, but up until the late 1990s, that boundary used to blur in favour of the village. City limits would extend far beyond the denser neighbourhoods that characterize urban areas and significant portions of the jurisdiction of “municipal” governments would actually consist of farmland. And indeed even now, it is possible to see cows walking on the side of streets in the middle of even the largest cities in Pakistan, and not just before Eid ul Azha.

But the nature of that boundary is now changing, and it appears that cities are claiming a larger share of the physical space of this country. And more specifically, while it was once the norm for the city to end and be immediately abutted by farmland, now it is much more common to see suburbs, followed by perhaps a small green belt followed by the suburbs of another city that is so close as to feel functionally an extension of the larger city in its vicinity.

This blurred sense of place for urban locations is a metropolitan area, something that functionally did not exist prior to the Musharraf Administration. As recently as 25 years ago, Pakistan had cities, towns, and villages. Now, it has metropolitan areas, each with dense urban cores, with suburbs and exurbs. Some of these metropolitan regions are even part of the one (and a half) mega regions in the country.

In this story, we will take a look at how the geography of urban Pakistan is changing, specifically not just which cities, but which areas within each metropolitan area are growing the most rapidly (and a handful of the ones that are shrinking). We will look at why these changes are happening and what the implications are for the economy’s future. We will examine what it means for how to find opportunities to invest in real estate. And finally, we will look at the rise of both of Pakistan’s mega regions (with one considerably bigger than the other).