Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

This paper explores the viability of the idea of “autopoietic systems” for sustainable land management. The first section of the paper expands on the existing conceptualisation of social autopoietic systems by Niklaas Luhmann to extract a framework for a sustainable real estate process. The second section attempts to bring the theoretical discussion to a live case study. The city of Karachi in Pakistan offers a unique situation in which the land that falls under the physical boundary of the city is controlled by fifteen land owning agencies. One of these land owning agencies, the Defence Housing Authority (DHA), functions on a land management model known as a Real Estate welfare model. This makes it a unique specimen to study not only in terms of land being used as welfare but also because the land in question is the highest valued land in the city. The exploratory study circles around to what extent DHA uses the different stages of the real estate process (land acquisition, land regulations, and land leasing) and its resultant high value of land to provide welfare to its beneficiaries. A case study approach is adopted to study the causal relationships in this phenomenon and both qualitative and quantitative data are used, extracted from both primary and secondary data sources. The third section discusses how the real estate welfare model is not functioning as an autopoietic system but can be autopoietic in nature and suggests policy recommendations that can aid in improving the efficiency of this process to make it so.