Re-identifying the Rural/Urban
The 2017 census in Pakistan reveals that with about 210 million population, Pakistan will leap forward to be the fourth most populous nation in the world by 2030 (Jan and Iqbal, 2018). The census reveals that the urban population was about 37%, which increased from 33% in the 1998 census showing a continuous trend of rural-to-urban migration. It is estimated that this urban share of the total population will increase exponentially to over 50% by 2025 under the ‘administrative definition’ (Abdul & Yu 2020).
This definition of the administrative boundary has noticeable demerits as with the passage of time the city’s expansion is occurring rapidly, thus all the new suburbs and peripheral growth will take place outside this administrative boundary, hence making the demarcation of city boundaries more delicate. This also leads to another misunderstanding of the census definition as its criteria for urban designation is so narrowly defined, leading to the fact that everything else is to be assumed as rural.
The notion of rural/urban was the most surprising outcome of the 2017 census as (Ali, 2018) emphasizes through his research using various methods, claims that about 70% of Pakistan’s population is ‘non-rural’, which in clarification specified that not all the percentage be specific as ‘urban’; rather the respective proportion of the population is concentrated in or around some urban core. This claim brought a new discourse in the discussion as his idea argued that the Government definition for an urban area follows a pre-defined historical criterion with a fixed dichotomy of rural/urban areas before taking the census without incorporating the modern complex realities of the urban sphere.
This leads to a serious fallout in the identification of rural/urban areas as all these figures reveal a lack of proper methodological background in stating the concept of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ as proper characteristic norms. Besides population census, several other economic and social statistical background reveals the level of dubiousness and distortion in urban/rural recognitions.
The criteria for describing an administrative boundary in depicting the concept of a city or an urban place would be logical in the sense that the purpose includes discerning the voting pattern in the legislative elections but is not a prerequisite response in identifying either the citizen is rural or urban. Also, without proper structure and outline the marking of administrative boundaries leads to the elimination of urban patterns, practices, and communities, as cities have engulfed the areas once considered ‘peri-urban’ as they expand beyond their administrative limits.
Perhaps more categories of settlements need to be considered, such as those which are unambiguously urban, which are peri urban and integrated with cities, which are in a rapid process of urbanizing (as is much of rural Pakistan), and those by some residual criteria which could still be considered ‘rural’.
The idea that in Pakistan all the areas that are far from the major urban cores with remote composition are the only localities of ‘rural’ formations while urbanization has taken over all of Pakistan should be disregarded (Ali, 2013). Far from it, but what is being suggested is that census should be outlined in such a manner that the criteria should be visible to plan and provide services if that is one of the main arguments given for undertaking censuses. Perhaps it should be better to look at densities of populations, rather than artificial administrative categories in the demarcation of rural/urban areas.
In this article, I have attempted to identify which areas can be classified as rural or urban by defining criteria that are suitable for re-configuring the areas into rural and urban classifications. The article will try to answer the ambiguity in the ‘urban administrative areas’ as in the case of Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan’, where the suburban residential communities around the city are not considered urban, even though they are provided with urban services. The dynamics of rural and urban are discussed to understand their complex relations in the context of Pakistan followed by the methodological framework.