What does a city owe its citizens and what do the citizens owe it in return? It is a question that should be central to every debate around the poor air quality, congestion and broken infrastructure in Pakistan’s cities.
French philosopher Henri Lefebvre described this relationship as the right to the city — the idea that urban life should be shaped by those who live it, not merely managed by those who govern it. To have a right to the city is to have a voice in how it grows, breathes and welcomes, and to recognise a shared responsibility for its care.
In Lahore and Karachi, as well as other urban centres, this balance has faltered. Pakistan’s cities have been stretched and strained by unchecked expansion, real-estate development and the logic of consumption. What we are witnessing now is environmental exhaustion, but also a deeper alienation between people and place.
Re-examining the right to the city, then, is less about demanding entitlements and more about asking how to rebuild a reciprocal, living relationship with the urban world we inhabit.
Pakistan’s major cities are expanding rapidly — and dying slowly. Lahore’s air is unbreathable, Karachi’s natural defences are vanishing and citizens have been reduced to consumers in cities that no longer belong to them. What would it take to reclaim urban life?
LEFEBVRE’S URBAN COVENANT
When Lefebvre first wrote about this urban covenant in the late 1960s, he was not speaking in the context of policy or development. He was responding to something more intimate — the growing sense that modern life was pulling people away from the places that once gave them meaning.
In post-war Europe, rapid industrialisation and suburban expansion were transforming cities into machines for efficiency, production and profit. Lefebvre saw that, in this process, ordinary people were losing not only access to urban space, but also their sense of belonging to it.
Lefebvre believed that the city should be understood as a living entity, one that is the outcome of countless human experiences, encounters and routines. Streets, markets, parks and neighbourhoods take shape from daily life. To speak of the right to the city, then, is to insist that those who experience the city every day should also have a say in how it evolves. It calls for participation, for claiming urban space not as property but as a shared project.
Lefebvre also warned against what he called “the bureaucratic society of organised consumption”, where urban life becomes defined by what can be bought, owned or controlled. In such a system, citizens are reduced to consumers and the city is treated as a commodity or as something that is to be managed, not experienced. Roads are built to move traffic, not people. Public spaces start to shrink. Consequently, planning becomes an exercise in control rather than care.
For Lefebvre, reclaiming the right to the city meant recovering the creative and collective spirit of urban life. It meant understanding that the city is not a finished product handed down by planners and politicians, but a shared expression of human presence. It also implied a responsibility to participate, to care and to ensure that urban growth serves life rather than consumes it.
WHEN GROWTH OUTPACES CARE
More than half a century after Lefebvre first wrote about the right to the city, his ideas resonate most clearly in places far from where they were conceived. Across much of the developing world, cities have grown into vast, restless organisms, expanding faster than their capacity to sustain life.
Pakistan’s urban centres are no exception. Lahore and Karachi, in particular, embody what happens when growth outpaces care, and when the logic of profit replaces the logic of belonging.
Both cities have become laboratories of the same experiment: how far can urban expansion stretch before it begins to consume the very conditions that make city life possible?
In Lahore, the pursuit of comfort and connectivity has come at the cost of the air itself, while in Karachi the hunger for land and infrastructure has eaten into the coastline, stripping the city of its natural buffers. Both cases show that the crisis of Pakistan’s cities is not only one of governance or environment, but also a crisis of relationship between people and place.
Over the past two decades, Lahore’s boundaries have stretched endlessly outward, swallowing farmland and orchards to make room for housing colonies, motorways and shopping districts. Flyovers and “signal-free corridors” promise convenience but privilege cars over people, sealing the city into a cycle of dependence on private transport. The loss of tree cover, unchecked industrial emissions and constant construction dust have all converged to create an atmosphere that is, quite literally, unbreathable. The urban economy runs on the very practices that poison it.
REBUILDING THE COVENANT
Public response has followed a familiar pattern: each smog season brings a wave of outrage, brief school closures and the occasional fine for factories or farmers. But these gestures only address the symptoms.
The deeper problem lies in how Lahore imagines progress. It is a city that celebrates what it can build, not what it can sustain. Development is measured in visible infrastructure rather than in liveability or air quality. The right to the city here has been replaced by the right to consume it, a right exercised through cars, gated housing, and air conditioners struggling against the very heat and pollution they help create.
In this way, Lahore’s crisis is not only environmental but ethical. The right to the city has collapsed into the right to private comfort, even when that comfort collectively suffocates us. To reclaim it would mean rethinking what we owe to the air we share — the simple, communal right to breathe.
In such a model, the citizen is reduced to a customer. Public space becomes a privilege, mobility a commodity, and environmental damage an accepted cost of living. The city, once a space of gathering and imagination, now mirrors the inequalities it sustains. Those who can afford it, retreat into enclaves insulated from decay, while those who cannot are left to endure it.
Cities survive on a delicate covenant between people and place — a shared understanding that the health of one depends on the other. That covenant has frayed. What remains are cities that function but feel alien to their inhabitants. To reclaim the right to the city is to recognise that the relationship between people and place is not fixed but chosen. It can be rebuilt if we begin to see cities not as products of authority but as collective works in progress.
In Lahore, that might begin with reimagining mobility, building for people instead of cars, restoring tree cover and treating clean air as a shared right, not a seasonal luxury. Cities are at their best when they invite people in, when streets belong to pedestrians, parks to families and the air to everyone.
The right to the city, in the end, is not a claim to ownership but to belonging. The right to the city, at its heart, is the right and the duty to keep it alive.
The writer focuses on environmental issues and is currently associated with WWF-Pakistan. He can be reached at sheheryarkhan95@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, EOS, February 8th, 2026
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