Speculation and circulation: real estate development and the market for land in urban Pakistan

This dissertation studies the dynamics of Lahore’s rapidly expanding residential real estate market as a means to contextualize and understand growing housing pressures in the city. Specifically, it examines developer motivations and mechanisms of profitmaking to uncover why and how expansion has taken place in recent years, and in whose interests. By studying and centring the actions of supply side actors such as real estate developers, whose activities and modes of profitmaking remain understudied and undertheorized within existing scholarship, it investigates why the city’s real estate market remains inaccessible for a majority of the city’s residents. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork, this dissertation shows that actors in the business of land development in Lahore have devised a mechanism that overcomes constraints in accessing institutional finance and allows them to profit off land conversions without using their own resources. This mechanism – what I characterize as accumulation by speculative circulation – relies on market-making techniques and the circulation of a market-based instrument of land acquisition and sales known as ‘the file’ to finance land conversions. The file, as I show, is an object but also a future. It is a fictional commodity that turns ‘land’ into ‘liquid’ form, helping create a real estate market that is structured, first and foremost, to accommodate the interests of investors and state actors, rather than those looking to meet their housing needs. This thesis argues that the valorisation and repurposing of land for investment purposes serves as both site and mechanism of housing exclusion, contributing to spatial inequality in the city and heightening the odds against more equitable interventions. It also shows how state entities themselves are implicated in this accumulation model, and remain invested in furthering sprawl, gentrification and dispossession. By illustrating how speculative practices operate in real estate markets, especially in contexts where theory expects otherwise, the thesis contributes empirically and theoretically to questions of land commodification and peri-urban transformations, particularly in rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South. It also extends and complicates theories of speculative urbanisms, financialization and dispossession.