“Worlding” Bangladeshi urbanism through water

Dasgupta, Shreyashi; Prins, Annemiek

doi:10.1080/02723638.2023.2184583

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Such forms of encroachment and extension, fueled by the expansionist tendencies of capital, make it so that inhabiting the urban periphery often requires "moving with-" the periphery as informal land-uses are pushed away from the center. At the same time, these shifting edges also retain a degree of fluidity (Dasgupta and Prins, 2023), open-endedness, and possibility, as "the city continues to host migrants as they come" (Sowgat and Roy, 2022: 425). In what follows, we further unpack this malleability, and the forms of shifting that correspond with it, from the explicit perspective of rickshaw garages and mess dormitories.…”

Section: Situating Garage and Mess Spaces As Part Of Shifting Periphe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting peripheries: Dhaka's rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces of work and movement

Prins

Dasgupta

2023

Environ Plan D

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This article considers how urban peripheries are made and unmade by forms of “shifting”. We examine these shifts from the perspective of rickshaw garages and mess dormitories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which both offer makeshift working and living arrangements to rural–urban migrants. By explicitly situating these spaces as part of the movements and crisscrossing trajectories that animate urban peripheries, we challenge the tendency in urban scholarship to analyze peripheral and marginalized spaces primarily through the lens of habitation. Breaking with residentialist and sedentarist approaches to urban space, we present rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces that are enabling and undergoing various forms of shifting, as their occupants move and alternate between different places, neighborhoods, and spatial arrangements to establish a continuity of work and income. We argue that these forms of manoeuvring are made possible by a degree of spatial malleability that reflects the territorial impermanence of the periphery itself, which is continuously pushed sideways through tandem processes of precariousness and improvement. By directing attention to the “shifting” in “makeshift”, we contribute to a less static understanding of how labor migrants try to hold their place in the city amidst wider processes of exclusion, expansion, and densification.

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Section: Situating Garage and Mess Spaces As Part Of Shifting Periphe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting peripheries: Dhaka's rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces of work and movement

Prins

Dasgupta

2023

Environ Plan D

Self Cite

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“…The NRC embodies the geopolitical complexity of Assam's history as a border region and former colonial territory. Nonetheless, efforts to update the state registry amount to a government-driven project of "othering" (Deka 2018), backed by many Assamese who fear being demographically, politically, and culturally overtaken by Muslim migrants from Bangladesh (Dasgupta 2000), but who willfully ignore the shared history of people living in the Brahmaputra River watershed. By requiring over 33 million residents to submit "legacy data," such as birth and land records, to prove that they and their families had settled in the Assamese floodplains prior to March 1971 (NIC 2014), the NRC process creates an artificial yet legally, socio-politically, and psychologically meaningful separation between people, who together hold a wealth of collective experience and knowledge about living with heavy summer floods in this highly dynamic landscape.…”

Section: We Don't Do Things We Talk About My Request To the Undp Is T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mountains of inequality: encountering the politics of climate adaptation across the Himalaya

Chakraborty,

Rampini,

Sherpa

2023

E&S

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There has been a widespread call for the development of transformative adaptation knowledge and strategies in the Himalayan region because of the intensifying onset of climate change impacts. But such transformative thinking is absent in much of Himalayan climate knowledge production, which builds on environmental deterministic and techno-managerial renditions of exceptional precarity; advocates for an increase in the scientific and expert driven projects on the ground; and remains rooted in the scalar realities of the nation-state. This paper contributes to the rich scholarship that counterbalances depoliticized renditions of climate change adaptation, by presenting "everyday stories of adaptation" that have emerged from the authors' work alongside Himalayan communities. In this work we ask, who is the subject in Himalayan climate adaptation discourse and policies? And how can their stories help us envision an adaptation praxis, which challenges regional narratives of crisis and provides alternatives to climate reductionist thinking/planning, by foregrounding the intersectionality and plurality of communities and ecologies? The stories come from three parts of the Himalaya: Uttarakhand, Khumbu, and Assam, and highlight the daily labor for adaptation and its mercurial relationship with the labor for survival. We find that intertwined with changing climate-society relationships are, historical caste privileges and changing generational relationships to land; the complicated engagements between indigeneity, communal sovereignty, and exclusionary institutional mandates; and life with ethnoreligious othering in an aqueous and geopolitically fluid borderland. Together these stories witness the relational social-ecological worlds of regional inhabitants, challenging their powerless and pejorative depictions through climate reductive framings. We conclude with a set of objectives to enable more hopeful and just adaptation futures.

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“Worlding” Bangladeshi urbanism through water

Cited by 2 publications

References 28 publications

Shifting peripheries: Dhaka's rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces of work and movement

Shifting peripheries: Dhaka's rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces of work and movement

Mountains of inequality: encountering the politics of climate adaptation across the Himalaya

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