City of Desire: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh

(Hardback)

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In this major 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-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Sheffield.

Reviews

This biography of Korail is a welcome addition to the relatively few in-depth studies of informal settlements. It challenges readers to see not only these settlements but also cities differently, at least enough to imagine alternative futures for them. That better serve their needs and concerns within the huge risks brought by climate change * David Satterthwaite, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) *
City of Desire presents informality not as a rarity but as the condition of living in contemporary cities. The biography of the large settlement Korail in Dhaka situates the lived experience of informality in space and time. And what is Korail Korail is a laboratory for understanding the works of power and its hold on people's lives. Korail is a critical perspective that reconnects critical theory to the lived experience of the city. Korail is also a metaphor standing for the inhabitation practices that sustain life in a precarious world. Shafique shows that amidst attempts to appropriate urban space, social life does not always follow the designs of power; instead, it is assembled from multiple desires. City of Desire strikes a hopeful note when it maps immanent solidarities that translate into political propositions, however ephemeral, and into collectives with the capacity to transform the fabric of Korail and its relation to the World through its multiple fragments. * Vanesa Castan Broto, University of Sheffield, UK *
The arguments presented in the book, using a lucid narrative style, illuminate an understanding of Korali beyond the usual binaries and categories constructed through the normative taxonomies. Instead, Shafique provides a unique kaleidoscopic view of the adjustments, tactics, strategies, resistances, protocols, and maneuvered process by which the settlement is made as well as remade every day. This is a reading that does not privileges any one disciplinary lens and instead collapses, intersects, folds, interrogates hybridizes and synthesizes multiple perspectives to present a convincing way of seeing a form of urbanism in which half the urban population on the planet will possibly settle in the coming three decades. -- Professor Rahul Mehrotra, Harvard University, USA
A fine and nuanced reading of a place so particular yet so familiar across cities of the Global South, this is an invaluable addition to a growing body of urban work that insists on rooting itself in place before it travels conceptually to offer us new ways to think of all cities. A wonderful, layered, and engaging read, where the writer's love of place gets equal place as their rigorous analysis of its urban condition. -- Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements

Author Bio

Tanzil Shafique teaches at the University of Sheffield and is an Associate of the Urban Institute. He is the Convenor of the the Southern Theorising Group (STingG), as well as co-leads Sheffield DesignLab. Tanzils research looks at informal cities and their adaptation to climate change, participatory spatial practices and decolonial/pluriversal thought. He recently won half a million pounds from UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for a wetland revitalisation project. He also runs Platform for Housing Justice, a grassroot activism infrastructure. He is co-author of Off-Grid Toilets (Altrim, 2022) and Atlas of Informal Settlements (Bloomsbury, 2023).