THE URBAN POOR in DHAKA: PERSPECTIVES ON THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

Abstract

The urban poor experience serious discontents, harassment, eviction, police repression and local goons threatening when using urban space for living and livelihood purposes. This study pursues to understand the poor people’s negotiation strategies with different powerful agents who occupy money, muscleman and political affiliation. Following a mixed method approach, this study investigates the two biggest slums in Dhaka as case studies. Findings show that urban poor have to build different social-contract relations with various local agents as survival mechanisms while economic activities using urban space are considered to be illegal in Bangladesh. The role of the state is somewhat ambiguous in this regard. On the one hand, the state is not evicting the poor permanently from the city but it is repatriating them on other grounds and, on the other hand, it permits hundreds of informal intermediary agents to work for sustaining informal urban settlements for the poor people. We argue that these distinctive socio-structural arrangements in Dhaka city is hindering poor people from getting united and claiming their rights to the city while also not providing them proper opportunities to fully appropriate the urban space. These socio-economic relations need to be considered in order to make a just city for all, from the RTC perspective.

Right to the city in the age of neoliberal development: A case study of two slum communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh

“…As a result, Bodega became the headquarters of the Right to the City, a national alliance of community-based organizations that, since 2007, has made it its mission to fight against "gentrification and the displacement of low-income people of color" (Knafo, 2015). Again, the protest made by the common people of Bucharest in Romania against the corrupted government and political elite after the Colectiv fire in October 2015 is the momentum where protesters used the urban space and the city centre location for a spontaneous action against the governing system, including deep-rooted injustice and corruption, state repression, stolen elections, and grievances, to establish their right to the city (Crețan & O'Brien, 2020;Arefin & Rashid, 2021). Similarly, in the context of south Asian countries, the street vendors of Delhi, Gujarat, and Mumbai in India have successfully achieved their vending rights through law enforcement and collective political actions under organizations like NASVI and SEWA (Jhabvala, 2010;Alva, 2014;Roever, 2016;Arefin & Rashid, 2021).…”

“…Dhaka has emerged as the 11th largest megacity in the world, with a large informal population of 6.46 million (The Daily Star, 2023;Lata, 2020;UN, 2016;Hossain, 2006). By 2030, Dhaka would become the 6th most crowded city in the world, and the population is estimated to be over 27 million (UN 2016, Arefin andRashid 2021). Approximately 40 percent of the population of Dhaka lives in the city's neighborhoods, and hundreds of millions of new urbanites will be engaged in peripheral economic activities, e.g., informal sectors, because of the limited resources in formal employment.…”