An urban country

ONCE upon a time, Pakistan was a country of village dwellers, their lives and livings dominated by the vagaries of crops and harvests, the rules of landlords and feudal strongmen determining what would and would not be. One third of Pakistan still lives this way, but things are changing fast, incredibly so. According to a report produced by the Woodrow Wilson Center in the United States, Pakistan is urbanising at a rapid rate, one that will result in nearly half the country dwelling in cities by the year 2030.

An urban country is different from a rural country; in rural societies, traditional structures such as tribes, families and caste groups dominate social life. Because the community is joined together by the collective risks faced by those whose lives are tied to the land, conformity is crucial and the best decision and course of action generally equals what is best for the entire group rather than for one or two individuals.

It is no surprise, then, that all decisions are everyone’s decisions, primary among them marriages, whose capacity to solidify existing relationships operates as a form of social capital that a family or tribe can use to further its interests. In Pakistan and much of South Asia, jirgas and panchayats have hence often carried out these rudimentary functions of governance and dispute resolution, ensuring all the while that the decision that is considered enforceable and ultimate is one that enjoys the endorsement of the entire community.

An urbanised country means a change in the very conception of what counts as a community. Even migrating Pakistanis searching for greener, more lucrative, pastures than those offered by their villages may continue to carry with them their tribal and ethnic denominators of belonging. As time passes, however, these claims are likely to become weaker.

Once in a city, an individual may initially rely on family or tribal networks to obtain initial employment since those are the most easily accessible realms of developing connections in the new environment.

Before long, however, the strength of connections dissipates as new relationships are developed in the city environment. But because urban communities are not in general united because of the collective risk of having invested in the success of, say, a crop or production of livestock, there is little binding them.

Neighbours come and go, as do friends, co-workers and so on. Relationships may develop but they may also and far more easily than in rural communities be foregone, exchanged for new ones or simply abandoned.

An urban Pakistan, then, is likely to be a far more individualistic Pakistan, where every person must look out for himself/herself and at most his/her immediate family.

This newly urbanised and individualised Pakistan (to some extent this transformation has already taken place) has the potential to be a better one. According to a recently released World Bank report, entitled Addressing inequality in South Asia, urban jobs are a gateway to becoming middle class.

The report finds that “upward mobility is much stronger in cities, where even self-employment and casual work can lead to substantial gains in consumption; wage employment, however, does much better. Moving to a better job or moving from a rural to an urban area partially offsets the disadvantages which result from the circumstances a person was born into. And, while migration within the country gives men the opportunity to be substantially upwardly mobile, it also gives women greater opportunities to earn, mostly in paid domestic jobs, construction, retail or other services.”

The projected seven million in Lahore and 19m in Karachi, Pakistan’s two largest cities, thus have the prospect of both prosperity and a more merit-based system to look forward to. At the same time, while an urbanised Pakistan may bring these fruits, it may also be beset with perils that are particular to the country. The evisceration that migration brings to tradition forms of dispute resolution and decision-making means that the need for a strong judicial system is more crucial than ever.

The movement of people and their lack of reliance on old forms of organisation create a more urgent need than ever for forms of governance that can allow a multitude of very different people to exist together. The cauldron of individualism that is the globalised mega city is also a generator of conflict, whether it exists in the private realm between husband and wife or involving more public relationships like tenants and landlords and bosses and employees.

Standing as it does at the very cusp of this transformation, Pakistan does not have the answers as to how this new country of cities and city dwellers will be managed. The under-resourcing of city governments aching underneath the burdens of burgeoning populations is well known and routinely mourned. So is the deplorable state of the country’s judicial system, whose backlog of cases, inadequate capacities for enforcement of judgments and morass of parallel jurisdictions create a maze that is just as daunting (if in different ways) as the implacability of a jirga of elders to the pleadings of a single supplicant.

The inadequacies of these two mechanisms, urban governance and judicial ineptitude, thus stand in the way of Pakistan taking advantage of its impending rural to urban transformation.

The tension between what was and what will be is palpable everywhere in Pakistan. Norms and mores are changing and the movement of people means groups that spent generations never interacting with those not like them are now brought together. The proximity of life in urban slums, the logistics of shared spaces and competitive employment are all posing large questions regarding the relationship between identity and achievement.

To truly harness the possibilities requires an acknowledgment of the fact that just when it seems they seem to be at their weakest, the instruments of the state, from city governments to courts, are needed more than ever. If they cannot be revitalised, revamped and prepared for the changes under way and the challenges to come, then an urban Pakistan could become a very terrifying Pakistan.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2015