Divided Borders, Shared Hierarchies: A Comparative Analysis of Spatial Governance and Climate Risk in Pakistani and Indian Punjab
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https://doi.org/10.66871/trf-j.v1i4.019##semicolon##
Urban Political Ecology##common.commaListSeparator## Postcolonial Urbanism##common.commaListSeparator## Climate Vulnerability##common.commaListSeparator## Punjab##common.commaListSeparator## Spatial Exclusion##common.commaListSeparator## Religious Minorities##article.abstract##
This Across the Pakistan–India border, colonial and postcolonial urban development has promised economic growth while producing uneven exposure to climate risk. Although scholarship examines climate vulnerability and social marginalization separately, their integrated historical relationship remains underexplored in the divided Punjab region. This paper comparatively examines Lahore and Rawalpindi in Pakistani Punjab and Amritsar and Jalandhar in Indian Punjab to show how shared histories of occupational segregation and spatial exclusion continue to shape environmental vulnerability among working-class Christians. Drawing on urban political ecology and postcolonial urbanism, the study uses colonial gazetteers, census records, and secondary scholarly and documentary sources to trace the historical production of unequal climate risk. It argues that post-independence spatial governance largely retained British zoning logic, concentrating minority settlements, katchi abadis and urban colonies in low-lying floodplains and along drainage channels. This spatial-occupational lock-in ties working-class Christians to polluted and hazard-prone sites, intensifying exposure to monsoon flooding, poor sanitation, and disease. Despite differing legal regimes—India’s reservation system and Pakistan’s minority quotas, both states reproduce comparable urban hierarchies by prioritizing commercial growth in affluent areas while neglecting environmental safeguards in minority neighbourhoods. The paper demonstrates that climate risk in the Global South is not a natural hazard alone but a historically produced, intersectional, and socio-spatial inequality.
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