Women’s mobility, neighbourhood socio-ecologies and homemaking in urban informal settlements

Abstract

The paper contributes to the growing research on relational thinking about housing and home by exploring the informal homes of rural migrants in Khulna city, Bangladesh. The concept of ‘unbounding’ is used to trace the fluidity and connections established between migrant homes and neighbourhood socio-ecologies. Walking interviews exploring women’s livelihoods reveal that different expendable agencies of the urban environment (e.g. trash, weeds and animal excreta) create conditions for labour in which migrant women hold specific competencies to secure essential resources for home. Unbounding positions home within a socio-ecology of multiple houses that women traverse to support their urban living. The approach offers opportunities to examine the unique ways urban homeless populations strategically as well as affectively engage with under-recognized agencies and actors in informal settlements. Unbounding provides a useful lens with which to raise new conceptual and empirical questions about housing and home in relation to the city that contributes to the homes and livelihoods of marginalized populations.

Keywords:

• Bangladesh
• unbounding
• housing
• homemaking
• informal settlements
• migrant homes

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (ID No. 2012233). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association for American Geographers (AAG) meeting in Boston in 2017 by the lead author. The session chairs, Andrew Gorman-Murray and David Bissell, provided valuable guidance on gender and mobility which significantly shaped this paper and three anonymous reviewers also provided helpful comments. Special thanks are also due to Hazel Easthope, Emma Power and Ray Dufty-Jones for their support and astute feedback throughout the process, and to Afrina, Prince, Shoyeb, Shariar, Tahan and Zayed, in the Architecture Discipline at Khulna University who assisted in documenting the walking interviews and overcoming many managerial obstacles in the field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All names are anonymized.

2 Lancione (2014, p. 26) uses the term ‘assemblages of care’ to describe an array of public policies and their discursive ‘expressions’ of practice and materiality that create different conditions of solutions to homelessness. Our paper refers to assemblages that are outside of the formal (and public) institutions.

3 Khulna’s urban fringe areas are rapidly urbanizing with an annual 2.95% conversion rate since 1998, indicating that the farmlands are gradually being converted into non-agricultural land use (KDA, 2014).

4 The Land Occupancy Survey (LOS) of 1977 and 1978 defined three categories of landless: households with no land whatsoever, those who own only homestead but no other land and those who own homestead and 0.2 hectares of ‘other’ land. NGOs often define them as ‘ultra- poor’. Our participants fall under the first category (FAO, 2010, p. 5, Bangladesh section).

5 This should not be generalized across all landless migrants to Khulna city; there are exceptions among those who take refuge in slums.

6 Two domestic premises that were studied for clearing weeds and cow dung occupy comparatively large areas of land (on average, .5–1.5 acres for each home) – these are typical homes belonging to the suburban elites.

7 Five group discussions involved different combinations of participants belonging to the 17 families and beyond (i.e. neighbours, community leaders, and aid workers supporting homeless communities).

8 ‘Trash’ here refers to old utensils and household items that are considered unusable in these relatively wealthy households and are sold to salvage shops, much like people in wealthy nations write off their old cars. However, our participants who are in financial hardship may still find ways to use them. By collecting trash, Delight is running an informal recycling service to these domestic ecologies.

9 It was sensed that Pearl's employer was subtly referring to her menstrual cycle when mentioning ‘bad days.’ As a stranger in the setting, the lead author felt constrained from asking for further clarification.

10 BBS (2015, pp. 5–6) defines a slum as the ‘cluster of compact settlements of five or more households which generally grow very unsystematically and haphazardly in an unhealthy condition and atmosphere on government and private vacant land. Slums also exist on the owner-based household premises. Often population density and concentration of structures are very high, sometimes, multiple structures are situated in one decimal of land’.