Determination of Urban Settlement Pattern for Optimal Regional Development in Punjab

Abstract

Urbanization is an inevitable process of socioeconomic transformation from agrarian to urban economy—relying upon secondary, tertiary, quaternary or even quinary professions—following Fourastie’s envision from traditional to transitional and finally to tertiary societies. But, this inexorable phenomenon is not always bound to have same consequences as urbanization may either be balanced, lognormal, and broad-based in nature or it may evolve into lopsided, dysfunctional, and pseudo urbanization, which is the main argument of the study. The urbanization and the consequent urban settlement pattern have been dealt by two overarching theories, namely; modernization and world system/dependency theory. The modernization approach explains urbanization as an ongoing societal transformation from agrarian to urban occupations, and all countries follow this unilinear growth pattern, though with differential rates and timings. While, world system theory uncovers the competing interests of traditional and tertiary societies. Resultantly, due to unequal or oligopolistic terms of trade between the two, urban settlement pattern in most of the developing countries has emerged in the form of primate versus skeletal towns/regions. Unfortunately, both regions have suffered from these imbalanced terms of trade. At one end, the skeletal regions have been deprived of their due share from available resources and at the other end, primate regions have suffered from spiraling levels of congestions, crime, terrorism, environmental degradation, and poor urban governance. The study examines the validity and applicability of both theories by observing the urbanization process based on time series data for more than one hundred years in Punjab, Pakistan. Considering the existing institutional and policy framework in the province, the study analyzes urbanization trends using a number of urban settlement and regional analytical techniques such as rank size, rank mobility, and temporal rank order analysis, form ratio, compaction index, centrality functional index, beta index, network shape index, distance matrix and urban density analysis in the province. The study explores that the urbanization process in Punjab is steady and observing high urbanization growth rate—conforming to the modernization theory. The study further confirms that the observed patterns of urbanization are concentrated and the urban base has shrunken over the years—indicating signs of lopsided or pseudo urbanization— conforming to the presence of dependency conditions in the province. viiTouching upon overarching theoretical underpinnings, the study suggests a two pronged strategy to deal with the urban challenge in the province. At one end, the study recommends fostering urbanization process in the province to accommodate the layoff population of rural regions. As a one possible strategic intervention, it recommends to upgrade those villages into urban centers having suitably higher threshold values in terms of functional and population criteria. This strategic intervention is not only expected to augment the urbanization process in the province, but will also transform the existing lopsided urban settlement pattern into more broad-based and a balanced pattern in the province. At the other end, the study advocates to curtail the over accumulation of investments into large urban centers. Again, as one possible strategic intervention, the public sector investments may be redirected from large urban centers to skeletal towns and regions i.e., placing both primate and skeletal regions at their right place along the decentralization continuum. So, with this interplay of modernization and dependency urbanization processes, the existing urban settlement pattern may be transformed into an efficient, equitable, and ecologically balanced system—invigorating homogeneity, parity, and balance in the urban settlement pattern and for having optimal regional development in the province.