What does a city owe its citizens and what do the citizens owe it in return? It is a question that should be central to every debate around the poor air quality, congestion and broken infrastructure in Pakistan’s cities.

French philosopher Henri Lefebvre described this relationship as the right to the city — the idea that urban life should be shaped by those who live it, not merely managed by those who govern it. To have a right to the city is to have a voice in how it grows, breathes and welcomes, and to recognise a shared responsibility for its care.

In Lahore and Karachi, as well as other urban centres, this balance has faltered. Pakistan’s cities have been stretched and strained by unchecked expansion, real-estate development and the logic of consumption. What we are witnessing now is environmental exhaustion, but also a deeper alienation between people and place.

Re-examining the right to the city, then, is less about demanding entitlements and more about asking how to rebuild a reciprocal, living relationship with the urban world we inhabit.

Pakistan’s major cities are expanding rapidly — and dying slowly. Lahore’s air is unbreathable, Karachi’s natural defences are vanishing and citizens have been reduced to consumers in cities that no longer belong to them. What would it take to reclaim urban life?

LEFEBVRE’S URBAN COVENANT

When Lefebvre first wrote about this urban covenant in the late 1960s, he was not speaking in the context of policy or development. He was responding to something more intimate — the growing sense that modern life was pulling people away from the places that once gave them meaning.

In post-war Europe, rapid industrialisation and suburban expansion were transforming cities into machines for efficiency, production and profit. Lefebvre saw that, in this process,........

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