Blogs

As far as Pakistan is concerned, it is urbanising at the rate of 3.0 per cent annually which is the fastest pace of urban sprawl in the SoAuth Asian wing (Shuaib et al., 2018. The major contributing factors of urbanisation in Pakistan are internal migration (Farah et al. 2012).

Pakistan is on the road to urbanisation at a tremendous speed endangering the sustainability of the succeeding generations by converting its fertile agricultural land into housing colonies and commercial enterprises. Most of the ongoing urbanisation is unplanned and irregular and it entirely depends on the will of the real estate developers. The government of Pakistan seems entirely immune of this widespread issue.

The key objectives of this review paper were to evaluate the general situation of urban sprawl in Pakistan, to investigate the methodological tactics which were used in the previous published literature, and to identify the major geographical areas which have yet not been surveyed and badly affecting the fertile agricultural lands.

Urbanisation is a critical issue for the economy of Pakistan as depend on agriculture for its economy. Due to the fertile agricultural land conversion, the people from the rural areas (losing their land as well as jobs) are migrating to the urban areas owning to manifold reasons.

In this methodological review article, the most relevant and recent published research papers in between 2010-2019 were included. Only those research papers were retrieved which contain data related to Pakistan. The review papers, letters to the editors, and newspaper articles were not entertained in this review. Through different key words, at the 1st stage, 100 papers were hunted down by the utilisation of different databases and search engines using urban sprawl subject headings. Titles and abstracts were screened for enclosure in the current study at the 2nd stage, and irrelevant and duplicate papers (letters to editor, review papers, and opinionnaires) were cast-off. Moreover, 69 papers were selected to review the titles of the papers at the 3rd stage. The whole abstracts of the selected papers were studied and screened at the 4th stage.

The ultimate decision either to include or exclude a particular research was taken to have a through eye view of the whole article on the basis of full text papers at the 5th stage. However, 26 papers were considered relevant and incorporated for consummating this study.

Utilisation of different databases and search engines.

The issues such as agricultural land conversion, deforestation, migration, psychological problems, inadequacy of housing — resulting due to urban sprawl have been highlighted by the researchers by the utilisation of mostly secondary data analysis.

As we know that the pace of urbanisation is relatively high in Pakistan as compared to other countries located in the South Asian region. It is quite alarming for a country like Pakistan which mostly depend on agriculture sector to sustain the economy.