To Whom Does the City Belong? Obstacles to Right to the City for the Urban Poor in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Due to a lack of available job opportunities in the formal sector and financial resources, in most parts of the developing world the urban poor rely on access to urban public space for earning their livelihoods. The existing literature shows that the urban poor are often evicted without relocation from public spaces by city governments in promoting a “global city” image. Within this context, this article explores how city authorities deny a right to the city for the urban poor. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, this occurs through a comprehensive and orchestrated programme to deny the poor their rights as citizens of the city, to exploit and extort them, to manipulate the political system and to stigmatise them. Focussing on poor people’s involvement in informal street vending in a case study of a slum in Dhaka, this article argues that Bangladesh’s particular form of oppressive political culture, particularly its authoritarian party system, does not provide poor citizens with even the voice required to negotiate a right to the city. The article identifies particular forms of everyday governance that lead to a complete stripping of effective political power.

KEY WORDS:

• right to the city
• urban poor
• public space
• street vending
• governance

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr Peter Walters, Dr Sonia Roitman and Professor Adil Khan for their valuable comments and feedback on an earlier version of this article and thanks all the interviewees who shared their experiences, views and time. Many thanks to the journal’s editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Additional information on the recruitment of interviewees is available from the author. Ethics approval was from the University of Queensland.

2. Similar attitudes, unfavourable to the informal sector, are evident in other Asian cities. Some of these attitudes and policies emerged from uncritical continuations of colonial policies (McGee, McGee, and Yeung 1977).

3. In India, to justify denying a citizen’s constitutional rights, the state and its apparatuses label the informal trader as an “improper citizen”. Indian courts are also performing this act by labelling slum residents as “encroachers” and “thieves” (Bhan 2009, 135).

4. This kind of extortion is not only practiced in Dhaka but also in many cities in the global south (see Anjaria 2011). For example, Swider’s (2015) study in China revealed that the state officials run similar types of eviction drives and demand bribes from the street vendors.

5. Recently, some NGOs have begun to provide legal advice to the poor and it remains to be seen how long this will be tolerated by the state.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.