How Planning Creates the Unplannable: The Case of the Katchi Abadis (Impermanent Settlements) of Lahore

This research delves into the role of planning in the Global South with respect to informal settlements. Using a case study of the informal settlements in Lahore, Pakistan, it evaluates the current planning process as a subset of the statebureaucratic-developer nexus that dominates political structures of postcolonial cities. In an era where socio-spatial politics are increasingly determined by the edicts of neoliberalism and urbanism is defined by the circuits of capital accumulation, planning institutions too form a part of the political power matrix. This research evaluates whether planning as an institution is complicit in the formation and perpetuation of informal settlements in the cities of the Global South. To that end this research highlights the informality of the state apparatus itself which subverts planning paradigms in practices of deregulation, exceptionalism and patronage to profit from the neoliberal financialization of land. It discusses how the multi-planar socio-spatial synergies of the city are reduced to binaries of informal-formal, order-disorder, legal-illegal, to reengineer the urban and rural landscape according to the edicts of global capital. This culminates in violent dispossession, segregation and peripheralization of the poor, complemented by a politics of patronage and common sense used by the state-apparatus to legitimize coercion and violence in the hegemonic administration of space.