This chapter explores the profound socio-ecological transformations taking place in the peri-urban landscapes east of Lahore, Pakistan, between 2014 and 2022. Drawing on historical accounts, oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how state-backed real-estate expansion—particularly the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) projects—has reconfigured agrarian ecologies, everyday livelihoods and community relations. What was once a fertile, canal-irrigated agrarian landscape embedded in reciprocity and collective ties has been progressively commodified, fragmented and absorbed into an urban order centred on speculative value and elite aesthetics. By analysing both the visible changes (land acquisition, soil mining, displacement, loss of agriculture) and the invisible transformations (erosion of trust, cultural dislocation, psychological insecurity and loss of intangible community assets), the chapter highlights how neoliberal urbanism extends beyond material landscapes into cognitive, emotional and social realms. The findings foreground peri-urban villages as more than sites of ‘developmental transition’; they are contested spaces where agrarian modes of life are undone, identities reshuffled and ecologies destabilised. Ultimately, the chapter argues that urban expansion in Lahore is not simply spatial growth but a political project of dispossession, one that externalise ecological costs and undermine localised forms of resilience. It calls for recognising peri-urban spaces as critical frontiers of environmental justice, where struggles over land, ecology, and community futures unfold in uneven and unequal ways.