On September 2015, the World Bank Group touted Bangladesh as a leader in South Asian urban development, reporting the fastest rate of growth in the region in regards to development indicators as well as population.[1] The massive inflow of people, many of whom are low- and middle-class workers in the capital of Dhaka, has been understood as naturally productive of an informal sector that is growing increasingly prominent in the urban landscape. Their existence poses a paradox of urbanization as a whole; states and city planners often use the rhetoric of national prosperity to articulate urban transformations, and yet the growing presence of a class of low-income and precarious people inhabiting its peripheral localities amidst this development process remains undeniable. While Dhaka upholds its rapidly transforming landscape as testaments to modernity, its new developments fail to sustain its residents in adequately providing the basic constitutional right of shelter. The urban poor and their access—or lack thereof—to formal housing must be studied within a sociopolitical framework as their inability to obtain sufficient and affordable housing is not simply a limitation of the state and policy, but rather a continual and deeply political process in which liberalization has been causal. The management and distribution of this prerequisite to urban life is therefore, critical to better understanding the intersection of power relations and urban space in Dhaka’s informal settlements.
Urbanization in the megacity of Dhaka has largely been sustained by large-scale migration that has produced explosive rates of population growth. Simultaneously pushed to the cities by poverty and natural disasters and attracted by the promise of higher wages and better access to social services, migrants have been the driving force in expanding the city and boosting levels of urban productivity.[2] However, the city’s infrastructure has been struggling to keep pace with this continual influx of people and thus gives rise to a multitude of challenges intimately tied to urbanization, the most prominent being the provision of housing—a basic prerequisite of urban life—for its classes of disadvantaged dwellers. The housing market in Bangladesh is defined by a surplus of stock for its higher-income citizens while the majority of its middle and lower classes struggle with a shortage of affordable housing.[3] Increasing rent in cities has made the price of living take a growing percentage of tenants’ incomes. Residents find themselves spending as much as nearly half of their income on housing.[4] The issue of low affordability is further accentuated by what Morshed identifies as artificial scarcity in addition to an actual housing scarcity, as a large section of public land remains undeveloped or developed with low density.[5]
Common perceptions of housing problem that has accompanied Dhaka’s rapid urbanization position the issue as a simple matter of demand far exceeding supply. Although migrant flows outpace the development of infrastructure, this perception neglects to implicate the formal sector and its failure to sufficiently provide shelter for residents. Liberalization, as enforced by organizations such as the World Bank upon developing countries, has been causal to this failure as the state withdraws from providing support for residents, and housing is one of the many factors within which this transition from state intervention to emphasizing private interests can be studied. Bangladesh is experiencing a massive shift in responsibility from the public sector in supplying and maintaining adequate shelter to contracting the private sector. This is reflective in the National Housing Policy of Bangladesh, which dictates that the role of the government would be that of an enabler in the land market, loosening laws and regulations surrounding infrastructure investments.[6] This marks a stark departure from the pre-liberalization years of the 1970s and 80s when the government took on an active position in supplying plots of land and basic infrastructure including electricity and drinking water to Dhaka’s lower-income demographic.[7]
The construction of housing in the formal sector, characterized by adherence to standards such as the Bangladesh National Building Codes (BNCC) set by authorities, has largely been left in the hands of private developers as a result of such policies. However, these developments remain largely inaccessible to many Dhaka residents as contractors in the formal sector tend to exclusively serve upper and middle-income populations. This combined with high construction costs excludes other population groups from being able to afford even the most basic forms of accommodation in this sector.[8] Formal housing statistics further underscore the challenges of accommodating a population which faces financial hurdles in obtaining units built by licensed developers; only 5 percent of Dhaka residents have access to this form of housing due to low affordability.[9] Furthermore, a 2004 report indicates that the formal sub-sectors—including public and private housing as well as cooperatives—only account for 15 percent of Dhaka’s urban space.[10] Thus, the pressing challenge of supplying safe, regulated and legal housing is underpinned by enabling policy and the current institutional framework of the city that has driven land prices upwards while consequently excluding lower-income and migrant populations.
Conversely, this is indicative of the large role of the informal sector as the vast majority of residents consequently turn to illegal means as well as the peripheries of the urban landscape to live. Many migrants and those within lower-income population groups have no other choice, but to settle in slums and other forms of informal housing that do not observe building codes and are fraught with dangerous and appallingly unsanitary conditions. Others have been forced to occupy public spaces such as railway stations, abandoned buildings, and marketplaces.[11] Pugh observes the formation of what he describes as “squatter settlements” in urbanizing areas in the developing world, characterized by occupancy on unimproved or vacant lands upon which housing stock is self-built.[12] Overall, while many Dhaka residents have been able to find adequate living situations for themselves, this has largely not been thanks to legal suppliers of housing; more often than not, many find themselves residing in unsafe, uninhabitable settlements over which they have no legal title and constantly face the threat of ecological disaster, legal action or both. These issues all point to the consequences of liberalization and enabling policy, as the marketization and commodification of housing for private interests have rendered the necessity of shelter inaccessible for Dhaka’s large population of lower-income households. As land and urban space have become subject to market mechanisms, the state’s withdrawal in providing essentials for urban life for its precarious and impoverished populations becomes justified in the nation’s wider modernizing mission.[13]
In the face of inadequate support from institutions and lack of a greater governmental strategy to improve the living conditions of the city’s underprivileged population groups, many slum dwellers have mobilized to bring change to the current system of housing distribution. Begum et al. have cited the role of non-governmental organizations such as the Association for the Realization of Basic Needs (ARBAN) and their approaches to low income housing. Despite their small-scale participation, their projects have been effective and efficient in meeting housing objectives such as ensuring access to urban services and mobilizing minority and female residents of informal settlements for credit assistant programmes.[14] By recognizing the prohibitive factor of high land prices in access to housing, NGOs are focused on harnessing the collective efforts of the community to build capital in order to improve living conditions of the city’s marginalized. Shams, Shahel, and Ahsan further expand on the potential role of microfinance institutions, such as Grameen Bank, in aiding the urban poor such as housing funds that have helped to build hostels for working women at low interest rates.[15] Despite the limitations of the current institutional framework that have left the urban poor to fend for themselves, non-governmental organizations and microfinance institutions have highlighted the potential of communities and marginalized populations to mobilize to overcome the current housing challenges of Dhaka.
As new developments continue to emerge across Dhaka, there is celebration in public discourse that the nation as a whole has arrived at modernity—the triumph of the legitimate—while the plight of the poor and the ubiquitous presence of the informal is overlooked. The challenges of providing access to the constitutional right of adequate shelter for urban households are not simply a matter of population growth rapidly outpacing the rate of development and expansion. Rather, the challenges are intertwined with the liberalizing policies that have been heralded as delivering growth. Rising land prices and private developers in the formal sector have excluded the city’s low-income populations from obtaining secure and habitable housing, giving rise to an informal sector that has had a greater role in illegally accommodating residents. However, many communities in Dhaka are demonstrating their ability to overcome the collective struggle to improve poor living environments through the action of non-governmental organizations and microfinance institutions. Marketized urban space and the redistribution of this space in the provision of housing have thus, become the grounds upon which the urban poor and political processes, that have touted liberalization in the name of development, meet.
Renee Xu is a contributor for the East Asia Section of Synergy Journal.
[1] Peter Ellis and Mark Roberts, “Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia: Managing Spatial Transformation for Prosperity and Livability,” World Bank, 2016, http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22549.
[2] Shariar Shams, M. Mahruf C. Shohel, and Amimul Ahsan, “Housing Problems for Middle and Low Income People in Bangladesh: Challenges of Dhaka Megacity,” Environment and Urbanization ASIA 5, no. 1 (2014): 176, http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/09754253/v05i0001/175_hpfmalibcodm.
[3] Ibid., 178.
[4] Manjur Md Morshed, “Illegality of Private Subdivision and Access to land for Housing by the Urban Poor in Dhaka,” Habitat International 44 (Complete): 388, http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/01973975/v44icomplete/386_iopsaabtupid.
[5] Ibid., 388.
[6] Ibid., 388.
[7] Halima Begum, Philip Richard Heywood, and Connie Susilawati, “Assisted Community Housing Initiative in Dhaka: Rethinking Role of NGOs in Affordable Housing Development,” Environment and Urbanization Asia 9, no. 2 (2018): 179-180, http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/09754253/v09i0002/214_achiid.
[8] Shams, “Housing Problems”, 179-180.
[9] Ibid., 179.
[10] Ibid., 387.
[11] Ibid., 178.
[12] Cedric Pugh, “Squatter Settlements: Their Sustainability, Architectural Contributions, and Socio-economic Roles,” Cities 17, no. 5 (2000): 326, http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/02642751/v17i0005/325_ss.
[13] Morshed, “Illegality of Private Subdivision”, 387.
[14] Begum, “Assisted Community Housing Initiative”, 219-220
[15] Shams, “Housing Problems”, 180.q
Works Cited
Begum, Halima, Philip Richard Heywood, and Connie Susilawati. “Assisted Community
Housing Initiative in Dhaka: Rethinking Role of NGOs in Affordable Housing
Development.” Environment and Urbanization Asia 9, no. 2 (2018): 214-29.
http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/09754253/v09i0002/214_achiid.
Ellis, Peter, and Mark Roberts. “Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia: Managing Spatial
Transformation for Prosperity and Livability.” World Bank. 2016.
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22549.
Morshed, Md. Manjur. 2014. “Illegality of Private Subdivision and Access to Land for
Housing by the Urban Poor in Dhaka.” Habitat International 44 (Complete): 386-393.
http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/01973975/v44icomplete/386_iopsaabtupid.
Pugh, Cedric. “Squatter Settlements: Their Sustainability, Architectural Contributions, and
Socio-economic Roles.” Cities 17, no. 5 (2000): 325-37.
http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/02642751/v17i0005/325_ss.
Shams, Shahriar, M. Mahruf, C. Shohel, and Amimul Ahsan. 2014. “Housing Problems for
Middle and Low Income People in Bangladesh: Challenges of Dhaka
Megacity.” Environment and Urbanization Asia 5 (1): 175-184.
http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/09754253/v05i0001/175_hpfmalibcodm.
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