Definition of a Housing Society

Housing Societies have gained immense importance overtime as they provide shelter to
the urban dwellers. A housing society is an organisation, owned and operated by
society members, primarily to address the residential needs of the community. Members
who share common interests for the welfare of the society, usually come together and
register a legally established society to make the lives of the residents stress-free and
hassle-free.
In housing societies, the membership is completely voluntary. All the rules and
regulations are thoroughly laid down by the respective state’s policy on bylaws that
govern all the housing societies of that state.
Housing is one of basic necessities of human population that is increasing with growing
population. The rising demands of affordable housing resulted in the development of
private housing schemes establishing on pure farmland in the fringing areas of the
cities. This trend is observable across the world in both developed and developing
countries.
Increasing urban population first led to a more compact housing, but from the second
part of the 19th century, urbanization started to spread out past the initial city
boundaries. Increasing urban mobility (e.g., trams) allowed a further expansion of cities.
At the same time, the richer upper class started escaping the busy unhealthy city
centers, moving to the greener countryside. After World War I, the population density in
the historic cities started to decrease, with people moving to the suburban areas. After
World War II, the delineation between cities and their surroundings became less and
less clear: the lack of spatial planning, together with increasing mobility options and a
law promoting homeownership, resulted in a further urbanization of the countryside. The
result is a strongly fragmented landscape. Together with this direct effect of urbanization
on the available agricultural land, came also the indirect effect of losing the exclusive
use of agricultural lands by farmers. Agricultural lands became increasingly used for
other services, such as horse-riding or residents enjoying a rural lifestyle.

A sector of economy which includes crop and animal production, as well as agricultural
engineering and production of agricultural machinery, fertilizers, and other kinds of
products to support farming. The agriculture sector is concerned with the production and
processing of crops, raising animals and harvesting fish and other animals in a farm or
in their natural habitats.
It feeds whole rural and urban population. Realizing its importance, planners and policy
makers are always keen to have reliable area and production statistics of agricultural
crops well in time. Policy makers primarily need accurate and timely statistics for the
important crops such as wheat, cotton, rice, sugarcane, maize etc. However, in recent
years, due to persistent hikes in the prices of essential commodities like pulses, onions,
potatoes, chillies and tomatoes these crops have also gained in economic importance.
Agriculture constitutes the largest sector of our economy. Majority of the population,
directly or indirectly, dependent on this sector. Pakistan has a diversified economic base
with the agriculture sector, contributing 24 percent in GDP and 37.4 percent in
employment and is the largest source of foreign exchange earnings. The predominance
of agriculture in the economy indicates that agricultural growth is a critical driver of
economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction, given its linkages with the other
sectors.

As cities continue to grow amid rising population and rural to urban migrations, housing
demands are being met by expanding cities into agricultural lands. Unplanned housing
schemes, commercial plazas, hospitals, schools, and other settlements are fast ruining
the agriculture landscape surrounding Pakistan’s major cities. In the 1950s, the
agriculture sector saw tremendous growth in the form of the green revolution by
introducing new crops and establishing educational facilities (Noman, 2018). But the
momentum was not kept, and inadequate policies and lack of implementation served as
a major setback to the sector. Weak land-use control and a fusion of urban activities on
rural terrain are now common observations in all major cities. When Pakistan came into
being in 1947, only 17 percent of the country could be called urban (Qadeer, 2020). As
of 2020, 37 percent of the total population lives in urban cities, with a growth rate of 2.5
percent per annum (Index Mundi, 2020). With this massive expansion, industries have
also expanded on to agricultural lands and have resulted in the subsequent pollution of
water bodies required for farming. Demand for urban labour, construction workers, and
manpower for the transportation and services sector has caused massive rural to urban
migration, creating a dearth of resources available to farmers.

Rapid urbanisation has also reduced the importance of the agricultural sector and
increased the value of industrial and manufacturing companies located in the cities. As
urbanisation has led to growth in the timber industry due to construction and housing
needs, deforestation is also spoiling the natural habitat on the outskirts of cities like
Lahore and Karachi. This also depletes the air quality and causes environmental
damage affecting the future crops which require specific environmental conditions.
There is a lack of vertical housing in Pakistan, which is causing encroachments on
agricultural land and pastures. Urbanisation has also changed the food requirements
and choices of the population. As cities continue to grow, more and more people need
to be fed. But this is not entirely positive for the agriculture sector as demand for
products and food items which cannot be locally produced has soared, leading to an
increase in imports of such items. Urbanisation leads to continuous loss of agricultural
land, and these processes put pressure on farmers reducing the agriculture sector’s
efficiency and output. Urbanisation is also associated with dietary shifts towards more
processed and pre-prepared foods due to reduced physical activity. As supermarkets
and wholesale markets continue to grow in cities, large scale agricultural producers will
be able to meet the supply-demand, but small to medium scale farmers are at risk of
losing their land to bigger players. This also means a shift in employment within the food
system, with fewer people working in agriculture and more working in transport,
wholesaling, retailing, food processing and vending.

2
Urbanization is rapidly increasing in the developing world as well. As pointed out by
Farrell (2017), current urban growth in developing countries is even faster than it was in
the corresponding period of developed countries. Specifically, in China, the rapid
urbanization has hollowed out the villages' population and caused uncertainties about
future food supply. In China, as well as the rest of the developing world, there is a clear
need for raising agriculture's productivity to levels where fewer farmers can feed the
increasing urban populations, while they at the same time can raise their incomes and
narrow the income gap to the urban income earners. New housing and infrastructure in
the expanding city-regions have received much attention in research and policy. As
mentioned above, in China and other countries, there are also concerns about
agriculture's future in the vast country-sides that are “given over to nature”.
However, the main bulk of studies have focused on the transformation of agricultural
land to built-up areas (Harvey and Clark, 1965; Brueckner, 2000; Bae, 2017) and the
impact of urbanization on the change in cultivated land (Deng et al., 2015). Much less
attention has been given to agricultural transformation and use of unbuilt-up land in
metropolitan regions. A pioneering work in this field was published by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture in 1989 and one conclusion is that metro farms are generally
smaller, have a higher land intensity in their production, are more diverse and focused
on high-value production compared to farms elsewhere (Heimlich and Brooks, 1989, p.
iii).
Urbanization denominates the change or shift from a rural setting to an urban setting,
and the increase in the proportion of people living in the urban areas and how they
adapt to this change pushes and displacing farmers in peri-urban areas out from good
agricultural lands because of high demand for housing and certain social amenities.
Agricultural land losses often occur in peri-urban areas where there are high-quality
farmlands. It is important that the government fulfills its obligations to strengthen urban
land-use planning systems so that there is increased stakeholder participation in land
use planning while encouraging vertical type building construction for commercial and
residential purposes.

3. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Agricultural land abandonment occasioned by an

unwieldy urban sprawl is a widespread Land Use Land Conversion process in Punjab
Province. Spatial-temporal shrinkage of arable land concurrent with intensified
densification within the built-up area as well as peripheral urban growth are persistently
on the rise, transforming the rural urban interface, that too haphazardly which has
invariably resulted in mushrooming entrenchment of slums or undesirable residential
areas with lack of services and amenities, unfolding chaotic intermix of conforming and
non-conforming land uses, thereby accentuating wastage of cultivable areas. SDG
goals as part of the 2030 agenda thus remain a distant dream.
Unplanned urban sprawl at the expense of reduction in arable land and sub optimal
mitigation measures to promote climate resilient agriculture, water conservation, also
conniving at arresting environmental degradation is resulting in reduced agricultural
productivity from the left over prime land which can turn ominous for food security and
poverty reduction, Loss of agricultural land, rural livelihood, land use and land cover
changes, land policy draw backs and environmental degradation are not attracting
remedial action in a concerted manner. Annual Development plan spending on
Agriculture, Urban development, Climate Resilience and infrastructure Development are
unable to yield tangible results.
The key research question, the study took up for resolving was as to whether the
current state of affairs was to perpetuate unabated or a holistic and structured reform
agenda could be firmed up with a multipronged remedial measures, supplemented with
a road map based actionable interventions.