A lot has been said on these topics individually. However, there is no data on location of cities, let alone the rural areas. All the current observations are based on a single source of dataset: National Census of 1998. This census, conducted 18 years ago, is already lagging behind by 8 years and i guess it will not come out before 2019. National census is being delayed for 8 years due to security while political rallies and elections, whose electorates are based on census data, are carried out without delay...amazing politics. The next general elections of Pakistan, to be held in year 2018, will definately be based on 1998 census data.
Anyways, these issue of data access, accuracy and currency have always hindered a reliable estimation of current urbanization trends in the country. Census 1998 did not provide spatial data for the cities. The basic questions which i have been unable to answer are quite simple:
- Where are the cities located in Pakistan?
- Can we get a single database of all the cities with their latitude, longitude, (what we call GIS based file of population) for Pakistan?
- What are, at least, the point locations of all the cities in Pakistan?
So i plan to work on this problem in the coming months. I plan to draw the point locations of cities in pakistan, estimate their most recent population using 1998 as the base year and pre-1998 growth rate as the projection criteria. I aim to prepare a GIS shapefile of cities of entire Pakistan in future for research on urbanization and population expansion in Pakistan.
Using my personal literature and data archives, i have prepared a more general map of cities in Pakistan, which i used in my PhD dissertation. I paste this map of location of cities with their population categories below. This map will be used as a starting point to generate a more accurate map of the location of cities in the country.
Other tags: Lat Long data on cities in Pakistan; GIS data on cities in Pakistan; Shapefile of cities in Pakistan, location of cities in Paksitan