Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh: The Production of Counterspace

This book analyses the key livelihood and governance challenges that the urban poor experience while navigating public spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Using data collected through extensive fieldwork in Bangladesh, the book contributes to the emerging scholarship of resilient cities, gendered space, spatial justice, and poverty in cities of the Global South. The book assesses the everyday politics of survival for the urban poor; how the poor negotiate different levels of formal and informal modes of power and governance; and the dynamics of gender. It explores how tenuous counter-spaces are created when these factors combine to provide a valuable framework for work in other urban contexts in the Global South beyond Bangladesh. Using cross-disciplinary perspectives, this book investigates the issues of human development, urban governance, urban planning and the gendered nature of urban space to outline how these issues enable or constrain poor people’s livelihood practices and their rights to be in the city.

Exploring debates surrounding placemaking and inclusive cities and their connection to poor people’s livelihoods, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Sociology, Development Studies, Planning, Geography and Anthropology.

Lutfun Nahar Lata is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Social Solutions research group at the Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research spans a number of areas, particularly she has developed an impactful program of research into the key social policy topics of precarious work, migration, poverty governance, urban marginality, housing and place-based disadvantage. Lata’s recent work examines the impact of the gig economy on migrant workers in Australia.