IN 1972, Pakistan’s census recorded Lahore’s population at just over two million. The projections were unambiguous: the city was growing at nearly four per cent a year, and the population would double within two decades. The data was not hidden. The trajectory was not a surprise.

And, yet, over the following 50 years, as Lahore’s population swelled to over 14 million, the institutions responsible for managing that growth — the planning and development authorities, the water managers, the municipal corporations, the transport agencies, among others — remained largely frozen in the organisational assumptions of a far smaller city.

The Lahore Development Authority (LDA), established in 1975, was designed for a city of three million.

It has never been meaningfully restructured to govern a megacity of 14 million.

Master plans were drawn up and quietly shelved. Land-use regulations existed on paper, but were ignored in practice.

The Ravi River’s floodplain was encroached upon in plain sight of the very authorities whose mandate it was to prevent it.

Green cover fell from 35 per cent in 1990 to under 6pc today — not because no one noticed, but because no institution had the authority and the political backing to stop it.

Lahore did not become an environmentally disastrous city because too many people moved there.

It became one because the institutions meant to manage that growth chose — or were allowed — not to.

The convenient alibi

Whenever Pakistan’s urban crisis is discussed in official forums — the flooding of Karachi, the smog of Lahore, the water scarcity of Quetta — the same explanation surfaces: too many people too quickly.

Population growth, in the language of the government, is the root cause that overtook all planning and left cities no choice, but to sprawl, choke and flood.

This narrative is not merely incomplete. It is a deflection.

Pakistan’s population growth rate has been thoroughly documented and consistently projected for decades.

The 1981 census showed a national growth rate of 3.1 per cent annually. The 1998 census confirmed that the trajectory had hardly changed.

United Nations projections from the 1990s forecast that Pakistan’s urban population would reach 80 million by 2020 — a figure that proved accurate.

None of this was concealed. All of it was available to every planning authority and provincial government.

The information existed. The response did not.

We just planned and developed on the ‘expectation’ that this rate would be managed downwards, while hardly any serious effort was made.

Population growth is often cited as the culprit behind the country’s urban chaos, but evidence points elsewhere: to five decades of planning failure, writes Dr Nasir Javed

Population growth is not a surprise. It is a forecast.

The failure is not that cities grew — it is that institutions chose not to plan for growth they could see coming decades in advance.

Thirty years ago, the evidence was already overwhelming that Pakistan’s population control programmes were not working.

Contraceptive prevalence rates remained among the lowest in Asia. Rural-to-urban migration was accelerating.

Every serious demographic analysis concluded the same thing: Pakistan’s cities were going to grow dramatically, population policy based on wishful thinking was not going to prevent it, and the only rational response was to plan for a much larger urban population. This did not happen.

Instead, successive governments continued to treat rapid urbanisation as a temporary emergency rather than a permanent condition.

The Karachi Master Plan of 2000 projected a city population of 14 million by 2020. Karachi reached that figure by 2005. No revised plan followed.

The city grew past its own planning framework to over 20 million, entirely ungoverned by any document reflecting its actual scale.

This is not a story of institutions overwhelmed by the unpredictable. It is a story of governments that found it politically easier to blame population growth than to invest in the unglamorous work of building planning capacity.

The institutional architecture governing Pakistan’s cities was largely designed in the colonial era and never fundamentally reformed.

Development authorities, municipal corporations, water agencies and transport bodies were created for cities of hundreds of thousands, and were never restructured to govern cities of millions.

Their mandates overlap. Their revenue bases are too narrow to fund the infrastructure that growing cities require.

And their technical capacity — the planners, engineers, hydrologists and climate scientists needed to design resilient cities — has never been built at anything close to the necessary scale.

In fact, the human resource entrusted with managing mega cities at times is not even good enough to manage a small town.

Pakistan lost over 1,700 lives and an estimated $30 billion in the 2022 floods.

A significant portion of that damage occurred in urban and peri-urban areas where unregulated construction on floodplains — construction that any functioning planning authority should have prevented — left communities with nowhere for the water to go.

Karachi’s water deficit stands at over 500 million gallons per day. And this is so not because the city lacked time to build supply infrastructure, but because no institution was ever properly empowered to do so.

The climate caused the flood. Institutional failure caused the catastrophe.

Karachi’s water crisis, Lahore’s smog, the 2022 flood losses — none was unforeseeable.

All were forecast.

The failure was institutional: authorities knew, but did not act, and were hardly enabled to act meaningfully.

The environmental price

Pakistan is among the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change, despite contributing less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Yet, the environmental degradation of its cities — the lost mangroves, the felled urban forests, the paved-over wetlands, the poisoned aquifers — is not primarily a consequence of global carbon emissions.

It is a consequence of institutional failure to enforce land use, protect natural systems, and plan infrastructure at scale.

Lahore’s air quality index regularly exceeds 500, which is 15 times the safe limit set by the World Health Organisation (WHO), driven by vehicle emissions on roads with hardly any decent public transport and compounded by industrial emissions from factories established without environmental impact assessment.

Karachi’s mangrove cover has been reduced by over 60pc through development that planning authorities either approved or failed to prevent.

With over 50pc of Pakistan’s population now urban — rising to a projected 65pc by 2050 — the World Bank estimates that continued institutional failure could cost Pakistan up to 18pc of GDP annually by mid-century.

These are not the costs of too many people. These are the costs of too little planning.

Rebuilding institutions

If institutional failure is the problem, the solution lies in building better institutions — a difficult, but tractable challenge.

Curitiba in Brazil, confronting rapid rural-to-urban migration in the 1970s, built an integrated transit system and land-use framework that accommodated growth without environmental collapse, not because it had more resources than Lahore, but because its planning institutions had genuine authority and political backing to implement long-term decisions.

Pakistan’s cities need exactly that: institutions with real power, not paper mandates.

This means restoring genuine fiscal and legal authority to elected local governments.

Cities that cannot raise their own revenue, enforce their own regulations, or implement their own plans cannot function as planning authorities regardless of how good their plans are.

It means investing seriously in planning capacity — the urban planners, climate scientists and infrastructure engineers without whom plans remain documents rather than built reality.

None of this requires resources that Pakistan does not have.

It requires the political will that governments consistently choose to direct elsewhere.

The cities we may still build

A national urban resilience strategy, developed with genuine participation from city governments, civil society and the communities most exposed to climate risk would provide the architecture that scattered local innovation currently lacks.

More fundamentally, it would represent an official acknowledgement that Pakistan’s urban crisis is a governance problem — and that governance problems have governance solutions, not merely blaming population numbers.

But continuing to blame population growth for failures of planning is not a strategy.

It is an excuse — one that has now been in use for 50 years while Pakistan’s cities have grown ever more dangerous, ever more polluted, and ever more vulnerable to a climate that will only become more extreme. T

he populations are here. The cities are here. The question is whether Pakistan will finally build the institutions those cities have always deserved, or we continue to multiply the crisis.

The challenge is immense and the timeline is short.

We need to run a marathon at the speed of a 100-metre sprint.

The writer is an urban development specialist.