DRIVE along what was once considered to be the fringe of any major urban centre in Pakistan and behold our collective sin: housing societies. All of us are complicit. Anyone with cash to spare ultimately reaches the same conclusion: investing in real estate is the best way to turn a profit. The business environment in this country has been so volatile and unwelcoming for so long, that it is indisputably easier to tie your money up in a plot and forget about it.

Land is a closed-ended investment and is not reproducible — which is what makes it safe. But it also means this kind of investment does not generate anything productive beyond the construction of housing societies. It takes the country’s wealth and parks it in plots, hoping that speculation will benefit them sooner rather than later.

The mania that has gripped Pakistan as a result means every inch of land is a premium commodity to be exploited. Nowhere else in the world do files and plots seem to dominate the national imagination as here. We live in a city, a province, a nation of real and aspirational property tycoons. No patch of earth is safe and everything is for sale. Prices in cities like Islamabad are artificially inflated and........

© Dawn