IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecanth/v9y2022i2p297-308.html

Landscapes of rizq: Mediating worldly and otherworldly in Lahore's speculative real estate market

Author

Listed:
  • Tariq Rahman

Abstract

The city of Lahore, Pakistan, has expanded by 20% in the past twenty years alone. Lahore's exponential growth is fueled by a speculative real estate market that incentivizes quick trades of plots of land rather than constructing buildings. At the city's ever‐expanding periphery, real estate developers armed with village maps and legal teams scout for cheap land, while agricultural landowners negotiate within extended families over whether to sell and demand higher prices based on their knowledge of market rates. In WhatsApp groups, overseas Pakistani investors carefully monitor land acquisition efforts by sharing news articles, personal photos and videos, Google Earth images, and copies of government documents to make their own assessments about the value of land. But although real estate is the most popular financial investment in Lahore, it is also extraordinarily risky. Developers sell land before they have acquired it; investors make high‐risk, high‐reward purchases in illegal projects; and even gains become losses due to an unstable national currency. On the basis of twenty‐eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyzes how developers and investors navigate risk through the concept of rizq, or the Islamic belief that material wealth is provided by God. I show how rizq mediates the worldly economy of real estate and the otherworldly economy of Islam, dual economies between which all credits and debts are eventually settled. Reducible to neither Islam nor capitalism, I argue that rizq enables a uniquely audacious form of risk taking that is transforming the landscape of Lahore.

Suggested Citation

  • Tariq Rahman, 2022. "Landscapes of rizq: Mediating worldly and otherworldly in Lahore's speculative real estate market," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(2), pages 297-308, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:9:y:2022:i:2:p:297-308
    DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12241
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12241
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/sea2.12241?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Harvey, David, 2007. "A Brief History of Neoliberalism," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199283279.
    2. Aaron Z. Pitluck & Fabio Mattioli & Daniel Souleles, 2018. "Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 157-171, June.
    3. Smith, Adam, 1977. "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," University of Chicago Press Economics Books, University of Chicago Press, number 9780226763743 edited by Cannan, Edwin, December.
    4. World Bank, 2006. "Urban Land and Housing Markets in the Punjab, Pakistan," World Bank Publications - Reports 8280, The World Bank Group.
    5. Horacio Ortiz, 2013. "Financial value: economic, moral, political, global," Post-Print hal-00869852, HAL.
    6. Andrew L. Ofstehage, 2018. "Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 274-285, June.
    7. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015. "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10581, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrea Rissing & Bradley M. Jones, 2022. "Landscapes of value," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(2), pages 193-206, June.
    2. Anitra Baliga, 2024. "Chasing land, chasing crisis: Interrogating speculative urban development through developers’ pursuit of land commodification in Mumbai," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(2), pages 349-366, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrea Rissing & Bradley M. Jones, 2022. "Landscapes of value," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(2), pages 193-206, June.
    2. Ipshita Ghosh, 2020. "Investment, value, and the making of entrepreneurship in India," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 7(2), pages 190-202, June.
    3. Alami, Ilias & Alves, Carolina & Bonizzi, Bruno & Kaltenbrunner, Annina & Kodddenbrock, Kai & Kvangraven, Ingrid & Powell, Jeff, 2021. "International financial subordination: a critical research agenda [working paper]," Greenwich Papers in Political Economy 33233, University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre.
    4. Robert Pollin, 2008. "Considerations on Interest Rate Exogeneity," Working Papers wp177, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
    5. Andrew L. Ofstehage, 2018. "Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 274-285, June.
    6. Jan van Duppen, 2021. "Book review: The Botanical City," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(8), pages 1746-1750, June.
    7. Eriksson, Axel, 2025. "A critical note on binaries in tourism," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 114(C).
    8. Howard Stein, 2012. "The Neoliberal Policy Paradigm and the Great Recession," Panoeconomicus, Savez ekonomista Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, vol. 59(4), pages 421-440, September.
    9. Jamie Redman, 2020. "The Benefit Sanction: A Correctional Device or a Weapon of Disgust?," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 25(1), pages 84-100, March.
    10. Donghun Kang & Moon Choi, 2025. "The development of Anthropocene Awareness Scale," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 20(2), pages 1-14, February.
    11. Ryan Higgitt, 2013. "Colonialism, Casteism and Development: South-South Cooperation as a ‘New’ Development Paradigm," Working Papers 112, International Policy Centre.
    12. Carbonnier Cl´ement, 2014. "The incidence of non-linear consumption taxes," Научный результат. Серия «Экономические исследования», CyberLeninka;Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «Белгородский государственный национальный исследовательский университет», issue 1, pages 5-18.
    13. Katzenstein, Peter J., 2022. "Worldviews in World Politics," EconStor Open Access Book Chapters, in: Uncertainty and Its Discontents: Worldviews in World Politics, pages 1-69, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    14. Hilary Silver & Alan Scott & Yuri Kazepov, 2010. "Participation in Urban Contention and Deliberation," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(3), pages 453-477, September.
    15. Alexander Emile D'Aloia, 2024. "Circular Economies in an Unequal World: Waste, Renewal, and the Effects of Global Circularity," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 100(331), pages 583-585, December.
    16. Osterhoudt, Sarah & Galvin, Shaila Seshia & Graef, Dana J. & Saxena, Alder Keleman & Dove, Michael R., 2020. "Chains of Meaning: Crops, commodities, and the ‘in-between’ spaces of trade," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    17. Bernd Schmitt & J Joško Brakus & Alessandro Biraglia, 2022. "Consumption Ideology [Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government]," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 49(1), pages 74-95.
    18. Grzegorz W. Kolodko, 2009. "A Two-thirds Rate of Success: Polish Transformation and Economic Development, 1989-2008," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2009-14, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    19. Nissim, Gadi & Simon, Tomer, 2021. "The future of labor unions in the age of automation and at the dawn of AI," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    20. Devi Vijay & Héloïse Berkowitz & Benjamin Huybrechts & Luc Audebrand & Marcos Barros & Marianna Fotaki, 2025. "Another World is Possible, It's Already Here: A Review and Research Agenda on Alternative Organizing," Working paper serie RMT - Grenoble Ecole de Management hal-05132352, HAL.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:9:y:2022:i:2:p:297-308. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=2330-4847 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.