Settlement of Pathan Migrants in the Walled City Lahore

Abstract

While urbanization is fundamentally a process of deep social transformation, urban environment research in Pakistan falls short in addressing issues of social change. This ethnographic study of migrant Pathans in the Walled City of Lahore endeavors to gain insights into the process of social change in an historical socio-spatial setting with regard to issues of migration and urbanization. The tightly circumscribed focus of this study -- namely a selection of Pathan migrants in a peculiar locale of the wider Lahore city -- makes possible a close and intimate survey of a significant social group, allowing the research to act as a window into greater, more general questions of urbanization and migration in a city such as Lahore. Migrants may be regarded as a locus of social and material processes of varied scales as they unfold in the urban environment -- uniquely having roots in the old and the new, in the universe of values and customs of their native community as well as the rapidly changing cosmopolitan setting. The migrants’ struggle in the city may be seen as characterized by an active resistance to the larger social norms of the city in favor of traditional tribal and religious norms. The findings of the study help contextualise the behavior of the migrants, shed light on their mistrust of and distance from the state and demonstrate the importance of social capital in the urban setting. The study also explores highlights the limitations of development initiatives such as the Sustainable Development of Walled City project, and the persistence of metabolic rift and core-periphery dynamics of urban migration in the contemporary globalized environment.