The news that the Punjab government is planning to dismantle and sell family dwellings and scatter its children in the name of a better future, is a sad, economistic rationalisation of the worst kind.

Reportedly, the government has decided to sell three large swathes of public property in the city -- to raise money and build housing for the poor in the suburbs a la the banlieues of Paris.

The segregating trends in the city have reached epic proportions as monocultures of housing built on cookie cutter lots, valued in money, now dominate the city’s spatial plan. It will be more destructive and unjust than the suburban middle class little boxes made of ticky-tacky that Pete Seeger sang about in the 1960s’ United States of America. This is a planned push of the working class and poor of the city to the suburbs. It spells pauperisation of the people and the city. Those who now occupy the inner city and its surroundings will lose all the benefits of services and community life that had accrued over a long time.

The plan is being presented as a solution to the housing needs of the poor. The poor are not even demanding housing; foremost, it is livelihoods which are being destroyed as never before in the history of Lahore.

The green revolution destroyed employment in the villages and forced migration. It was a social and environmental nightmare for villages; now it is the social destruction of the city.

Local manufacture and business have in recent years borne the brunt of destructive development that came in the wake of the Orange Line Metro Train project, flyovers and signal-free corridors. All these were initiatives for public good but undue haste, lack of respect for existing populations and businesses and even cost characterised the methods and vision of city planners.

The social and cultural life of Lahore cannot be separated from the work that sustained people and the scale, ownership and links it had with the surrounding hinterland. It is this which is being reconfigured through new infrastructure and liberal imports.

The force shaping the new city is a more fundamental shift in the economy where small manufacturers and local businesses are systematically eroded through vast structural adjustment on a global scale.

The new proposal by the Punjab government is not about rolling back the impoverishing tide of capitalist growth, it is subsidising it and creating more long-term and pronounced social inequality.

This process is made invisible by wrapping the plans as pro-poor initiatives and hiding the real profit-hungry drive that wants to use the city for further gains for those with money to invest.

The American sociologist Herbert Gans gave a scathingly objective list of the many positive functions of poverty, i.e. it helps get dirty work done, subsidises directly and indirectly the affluent by poor working for low wages and hence never acquiring wealth and not the least by creating employment for middle class professionals who work to manage and assuage the injuries of poverty.

The developers, engineers and architects will be cheered as would those seeking to live in world class accommodation in a happening city centre of cafés and sanitised security. As an accumulative scenario it will impoverish the city by squeezing the space for the lower classes.

The abandoned grain storage facility in Guru Mangat is a virtual brownfield but there is abundant dense, low-income habitation around it to help regenerate it. It has the potential to become a significant public amenity and enrich the environment for thousands who live in the area.

A pro-poor development done right can help keep the land value down as it will not offer a vast chunk of space for developers. The choice for the city planners is to follow value driven development versus monetary value returns, especially those that come at the cost of displacement of the economically weaker citizens.

Two of the localities marked for sale are in Guru Mangat area of Gulberg and the Omni Bus Depot on Ferozepur Road. Both are surrounded by mixed communities of largely lower middle and working class who will be subjected to gentrifying pressure through this development.

In case of the third parcel on the canal which is already a domain of the rich and institutions for their service it must be stalled through a continued possession of state land on this choice location.

Gentrification haunts all urban centres around the world, especially in South Asia where it comes through state-sponsored initiatives in the name of development. Reversing this trajectory requires more than a change in urban design but land use policies can create sufficient roadblocks to continued investment in the idea of the city as a growth machine. The promised jobs in construction cannot compensate for the loss of accumulated social wealth of community life and diversity of services. The view that neighbourhoods should welcome all new developments, that any investment is better than none at all, is a flawed social policy.

The experience from around the world including North America and London is that profit making developers’ priorities and needs of existing lower and middle class resident populations seldom coincide. The new, richer buyers inflate property value and push out the less privileged. Yet, it is celebrated because it brings economic growth, just as casinos promise wealth to the native American reservations, and prostitution too can serve the same function but we may not be as easily convinced to welcome it.

It is the social outcomes that must decide the planning policies and this includes quality of life and culture. The latter is often measured by tourist potential and prosperity, by the appearance of the rich on the streets and vast armies of poor to serve them. Production, leisure of the masses, and the sustainability of the environment have no value if they cannot be measured in terms of money.

Even the monetary budgets are statistics and lies without accounting for all losses in the present and the future and many of which are of value we cannot ever calculate. How do we measure the loss of the sense of belonging, of diversity of natural life, animal, insects and plants and, most of all, clean water and air? All these are sure to be lost because of this development. Water usage by the rich far exceeds that by the poor, as do energy and waste, the bane of modern cities.

Lahore has suffered enough from surgical operations and lies sapped of its proverbial urbanism. This was a Lahore where generous vegetation mitigated the hot, dry climate, and a rich cultural life softened the harsh material realities of urban life. This culture was born of the diversity of occupations, historical associations and institutions. Recent interventions by the state have been like blows of a butcher’s cleaver instead of a healing hand. We pray for mercy and meanwhile must struggle to reclaim a city of the people.