City of Desire
Subtitle: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh
By: Tanzil Shafique
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2024
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9781350438637
Subjects: Slums; Bangladesh; Development studies; Urban communities; Social conditions
Description: In this major open access contribution to Global South urban studies, Tanzil Shafique offers a new way of knowing and engaging with the most common urban environment in the Global South - informal settlements, or "slums".  Informal settlements house more than a billion people now and will house three billion people by 2050. Yet they remain marginalised in urban theory and practice, and most projects to improve them fail due to a lack of knowledge of the ongoing processes that build them.  Through a detailed case study of Karail, the largest informal settlement in Bangladesh, Shafique offers ground-breaking insights into the production of informal urbanism through a brand-new approach rooted in deep ethnography and spatial mapping. Shafique explores, for the first time, the many different desires of settlement-dwellers and how these drive everyday urban change. He also offers brilliantly innovative recommendations for the policy-making, upgrading and management of both existing and future informal settlements.    Written in an engaging narrative that weaves local stories with theoretical insight, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in international development, urban studies, sociology, and architecture.  The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Sheffield.
Notes: Open Access Unrestricted online access

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Table of contents: title: Introduction: Half the World at Stake  PART 1: Agents 1. State: Another Hole in the Wall 2. People: Why "The Community" Does Not Exist 3. NGO: The Silent Partner 4. Event: Shaped by Fire  PART 2: Arrangements 5. Legitimacy: The Social Imperative 6. Land: Lake? What a Load of Rubbish! 7. Housing: A Desire for Six Arms 8. Access: Through the Eye of a Needle  PART 3: Intensities 9. Public Space: Fifty Shades of Publicness 10. Functional Mix: Holy Cow! 11. Governance: The Seventy Godfathers Epilogue: Bricolage, Bazaar, and Bog-box Appendix: Dirty Methods  Bibliography  Index