In Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, high population growth rates, decades of rural-urban migration, and rampant land and real-estate speculation have contributed to the rapid urbanization of peri-urban land and the engulfing of pre-existing rural settlements. Lahore’s spatial transformation goes hand in hand with an increasingly complex urban governance framework. Historically shaped by colonial planning institutions and decades of political instability as power alternated between military and civilian regimes, Pakistan’s governance practices have contributed to increasing levels of urban segregation and inequality. This raises questions around the in- and exclusionary role of planning in fostering or constraining residents’ access to housing and services. Comparing three vignettes and drawing upon insights gained from extensive fieldwork, this article employs the concept of ‘access-assemblages’ to analyze how access to urban resources—i.e., land, housing, and services—is experienced, disputed, and negotiated in the rapidly urbanizing peri-urban fringe of Lahore. The cases represent different spatial and socio-political configurations brought about by a variety of actors involved in the planning and development of the city’s periphery as well as in contesting development: private developers, the army, the city development authorities, and the residents of affected villages. The analysis unpacks the planning rationalities and mechanisms that reinforce inequalities of access and exclusions. Unfolding practices that enable or hinder actors’ ability to access resources sheds light on the complex layers assembled in urban planning in Lahore and serves as a basis to rethink planning towards a more inclusive approach.

Looking at evolving urban governance and planning practices in the city of Lahore, Pakistan, the article aims to understand—from an Evolutionary Governance Theory perspective—to what extent these practices steer paths and modes of service provision and housing for low-income residents. With a focus on the endurance and transformations of urban governance practices and institutions, we first explore the influence of the changing development discourse and the impact it has had on the (re)configuration of urban governance and housing policies in Lahore. Second, drawing on extensive fieldwork and empirical data collected between 2012 and 2016, we highlight three vignettes depicting the development of different housing options for low-income residents in Lahore, i.e., a government-steered subsidised housing scheme, a privately developed ‘pro-poor’ settlement in the peri-urban fringe of the city, and residential colonies already—or in the process of being—regularised. By analysing the relationship between governance frameworks, the establishment of the three types of settlements and how residents manage to access housing and services there, we demonstrate how purposive deregulation in governance and policy generates a disconnect between urban normative frameworks (i.e., urban planning tools and pro-poor housing policies) and residents’ needs and everyday practices. We argue that this highly political process is not exclusively path-dependent but has also allowed the creation of liminal spaces based on agency and collective action strategies of low-income residents.

In the context of neoliberal cities, with growing levels of housing commodification and space competition, sharing and commoning urban initiatives within the larger framework of urban social movements are shaping tactics of contestation. To what extent they represent sustainable efforts to urban commons governance remains largely unexplored. This article aims therefore to contribute to better understand how practices of solidarity can be maintained beyond their first productive phase and to explore the engagement of social movement and initiatives actors in the production and maintenance of shared spatial resources. To do that, we focus on knowledge practices as a key factor to ensure sustainability of actions within and beyond urban initiatives that engage with and practice sharing and space-commoning. Drawing on figurational sociology, we consider individuals involved in these urban initiatives as embedded in multiple social settings and networks of collaboration and interdependence, in which transactions such as resources, ideas and information take place giving way to collective action, new modes of participation and urban transformation. Within this conceptual framework, we explore how urban initiatives networks produce and transfer their knowledge (1) within their own internal set-up, (2) to private and public institutions (e.g., administration and political actors) and (3) to other civil society organizations. To do so, we draw on qualitative research conducted in three German cities, Kassel, Stuttgart, and Berlin on the topics of sharing and commoning practices in the field of housing and public space. By looking at the practices by which knowledge—required for action and networking—is co-/re-produced and exchanged, we identify those that constrain or enable sharing and commoning strategies on the long-term and have therefore a larger potential for sustaining efforts of urban commons governance.

While the growing commodification of housing and public spaces in European cities is producing urban inequalities affecting mostly migrant and vulnerable populations, there are also manifold small-scale neighbourhood-based collaborative processes that seek to co-produce shared urban resources and contribute to more resilient urban developments. As part of the ProSHARE research project that investigates conditions in which <em>sharing</em> takes place and can be expanded to less-represented populations, we focus here on sharing and space-commoning practices within urban living labs. Considered multi-stakeholders sites for innovation, testing, and learning with a strong urban transformative potential, urban living labs have received increasing academic attention in recent years. However, questions related to whether and how labs facilitate processes of exchange and negotiation of knowledge claims and generate spatial knowledge remain largely unexplored. We address this gap by looking at the role urban living labs play in the regeneration of neighbourhoods, asking how sharing and space-commoning practices generate situated spatial knowledge(s) that can be used in planning processes, and what type of settings and methods can facilitate such processes. These questions are addressed in the context of four ProSHARE-Labs located in Berlin, Paris (Bagneux), London, and Vienna, drawing on a cross-case analysis of the functioning of these hubs, the research methods applied in each context, and on the translocal learning and possibilities for upscaling resulting from these parallel experiences.

The debate on urban commons yields relevance for shared histories and heritage in divided and post-conflict societies. Albeit memory is always subjective, heritage management tends to engender a linear view of the past that suggests a preconceived future development. Where the past is denigrated to prove the impossibility of ethnoreligious communities’ coexistence even though they have lived together peacefully for centuries, it risks corroborating us-them divisions for posterity and undermines reconciliation and peacebuilding. In this historically informed article, we argue that urban change in Lahore since 1947 has gone hand in hand with the purposive destruction of the common heritage shared by India and Pakistan. This interpretation of the past for the future reflects different forms of violence that surface in heritage management. Based on empirical data collected on heritage practices in the Old City of Lahore, Pakistan, we analyse the approach of the Walled City of Lahore Authority towards heritage management. Our focus on ignored dimensions and objects of heritage sheds light on the systematic denial of a shared history with Hindus and Sikhs before and during the 1947 partition of British India. This partial ignorance and the intentional neglect, for instance, of housing premises inhabited once by Hindus and other non-Muslim minorities, prevent any constructive confrontation with the past. By scrutinising the relationship between urban change, nostalgia, memory and heritage, this article points out that heritage management needs to be subjected to a constructive confrontation with the past to pave the ground for future reconciliation.