Absent-Present Migrants and Governance in Encroached Peripheries: Mobility, Property Relations, and the Politics of Urban Expansion in Peri-urban Pakistan

Across world regions, peri-urban spaces have become critical sites of socio-spatial transformation as expanding metropolitan corridors absorb formerly agrarian settlements. This dynamic is particularly pronounced in South Asia, where rapid urbanization, weak planning regimes, and land commodification intensify pressures on rural-urban fringes. In Pakistan, the urban population has grown from 35% in 2000 to over 40% today, with peri-urban belts absorbing much of this expansion. These shifts intersect with long-standing patterns of rural to urban migration, driven by the search for more stable livelihoods and have produced dispersed households in which key decision-makers reside in cities while retaining ancestral ownership in the villages they have left behind. Although these intersecting processes fundamentally reconfigure how authority, governance, and access to land are negotiated, existing scholarship remain dominated by the spatial patterns and distributive consequences of this process, typically analyzing peri-urbanization through before/after comparisons that assess who benefits and who loses from land conversion. In doing so, however, social positions are often treated as relatively stable categories. This perspective risks overlooking how peri-urban land conversion unfolds as a socially mediated process that simultaneously reorganizes people differently positions to same land through mobility, property relations, and shifting authority over land. Understanding how mobility trajectories shape actors’ capacity to govern land, negotiate speculative pressures, and navigate the transition from agrarian to urban economies therefore remains an important analytical challenge. This study addresses this question through qualitative research conducted in ten peri-urban villages surrounding Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Drawing on event reconstructions and an event-centered relational analytical framework, the study examines how mobility trajectories, those who stay, those who circulate, and those who migrate to the city, reconfigure governance regimes in peripheralized peri-urban settings. The analysis highlights three key dynamics. First, mobility trajectories reshape local authority structures, enabling urban-based actors to influence land valuation and conversion decisions despite their spatial absence. Second, governance over land conversion unfolds through fragmented networks of brokers, bureaucratic intermediaries, and kinship authorities rather than through coherent planning regimes. Third, the conversion of agricultural land into speculative real estate produces sharply uneven livelihood trajectories, particularly for households dependent on cultivating land they do not own. By foregrounding the dynamic production and transformation of social positions, the article reconceptualizes peri-urban transformation as a process through which speculative urbanization reorganizes agrarian relations and reshapes class formation at the urban frontier.