Defence forces owning huge tracts of lands in semi-rural and urban areas isn’t an uncommon thing. They need space for training, storage, residence, training among a hundred other things. So they end up with large amounts of land ownership almost everywhere in the world.

But countries owned by their defence forces like Pakistan are a bit different. They not only control large swathes of land for military use, but also a lot of commercial and residential lands and properties too. It is not possible to give exact numbers without access to land records and tedious research. So I did the next best thing of getting rough figures using maps.

In this post, I am posting general figures for 3 Pakistani cities which house one or more cantonments. One figure is the general area of a city which includes all the residential, commercial, sub-urban and military lands. I am being generous and have included some places which are probably not under city municipal limits.

Other figure is total area of military cantonments, air fields, storage and training areas. Pakistani defence forces also own a large number of residential, colonies, malls, factories, farms etc., and most of the are not included in this figure.

In almost every city with defence cantonments, the military land ownership is 10-35% of total urban and semi-urban area. Will post more on this if there’s any interest.