An urban nation

One often hears that ‘Pakistan is an agricultural country’. The unsaid but implied part of this is that we are also a rural country. However, this may well not be true, at least according to the World Bank. A policy research working paper released by the WB last month titled ‘When Does a Village Become a Town? Revisiting Pakistan’s Urbanisation Using Satellite Data’, claims that, while official data shows that just 39 per cent of the country’s population resides in urban areas, the true figure is closer to 88 per cent. Simply put, Pakistan’s urban population is more than double what the nation’s policymakers think it is and, quite likely, what even many ordinary people believe it is. According to the working paper, the discrepancy arises from Pakistan’s reliance on administrative boundaries that do not reflect actual population density or settlement patterns. But why does any of this matter? For one the mismatch between the actual and official designation of urban areas has important policy implications. According to the paper, the misclassification of urban areas decreases the capacity to collect tax revenues, since property taxes are only levied on urban buildings, deliver services and have statistical visibility of the urban population.

As such, the report implies that many urban centres are being deprived of the financial resources needed to cater to their expanding populations. While the lack of resources for urban areas and a supposed rural bias are key complaints of those living in mega cities like Karachi and Lahore, the working paper finds that it is actually secondary cities and peri-urban areas driving Pakistan’s recent urban expansion. Such places barely feature in the national discourse on resource allocation at a time when providing them with sufficient resources and services is becoming increasingly important for quality of life and economic growth in the country. At the same time, by classifying areas that are actually urban as rural, the country ends up masking the true extent of the urban-rural gap and potentially undermining national policies to help rural areas. How can the country hope to make any progress if it is systematically misidentifying what different areas need and how much? The fact that peri-urban areas are playing a much bigger role in urbanisation than is otherwise thought also highlights the chaotic nature of the country’s urbanisation process and the urban sprawl problem.

As often as one hears about the importance of agriculture, one is also warned about how the ever expanding housing societies and other developments are eating into agricultural land. If a growing share of the rural population is leaving farming behind, transforming previously rural areas into urban or peri-urban locations, what implications does this have for things like food production and security? What role is this shift playing in the food inflation we have seen over the last few years and how many densely populated areas have now been established in places that were previously flood plains? As important as these questions are, the country will not get the right answers to them if the misclassification problem continues. According to the paper, very few countries use purely administrative definitions to identify urban areas and incorporating more objective metrics like population density, service access and other urban characteristics will enable Pakistan to account for a more varied urban landscape. Strangely enough, the report claims that the last use of objective metrics to define urban centres in the country was in 1972. Not only is the country not catching up with modern best practices it actually appears to be moving backwards in some cases. Who is less reliant on numbers in the 21st Century than the 20th? Apparently us.