Tuesday, October 20, 2016 Opinion Re-imagining the urban by Shayer Ghafur | http://www.newagebd.net/article/1162/re-imagining-the-urban Published: 22:00, Oct 20,2016 AN URBAN age anchors the 2016 Habitat 3 conference in Ecuador as a half of the world’s population has started living in urban areas since 2008. The post-World War II global spread of urbanisation and transformation of the urban areas presents an intriguing phenomenon to deal with and a moment to rethink our inherited ideas of the urban-rural binary. Ever since Aesop’s fable, ‘the town mouse and the country mouse’, had allegorically depicted this binary, the contrast between the country and the city continued. The changing relations between the country and the city have for long been problematic in social sciences. Scholars today argue our living in a ‘planetary urbanisation’ that dispenses with the urbanrural binary for an urban continuum. The colonisation of the near and distant rural areas by expanding cities through the social production of space underpins the embedding of the planetary urbanisation in an urban society. What would be the local, situated explication of this planetary urbanisation in reimagining the urban beyond an urban-rural binary in Bangladesh? If, indeed, there is a case to reimagine the urban in Bangladesh, then on whose terms and to what ends? Answers to the questions trace the contradictions in an unfolding urban society in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has come a long way from its early 1970s ‘bottomless basket’ to the present ‘world’s tailor’ status. This journey is a success story amidst a backdrop of rapid urbanisation; urban population in Bangladesh grew from 8.78 per cent (6.27 millions) in 1974 to 28 per cent (41.94 millions) in 2011. The latest 2011 census defines urban areas composed of city corporations, municipalities, upazila headquarters, and cantonment areas. A progressive private-sector development because of global economic integration, since the 1980s, increased agricultural production; and an increased remittance inflow and an expanded mobile telecommunications network have contributed to raising its gross domestic product and the per capita income. The spread of NGOs, government organisations and donorsfunded initiatives, on the other hand, have extended social and physical services countrywide to improve the Human Development Index. Despite these progresses during an ongoing urbanisation, decreasing per capita land remains a threat to its path to prosperity, let alone people’s sustained dwelling in relation to their surrounding, built or natural, environment. The author of Compact Townships and the Magical 10% puts forth this looming threat: how would an economy accommodate and feed an increased 250 million population by the end of this century while Bangladesh has been losing its arable land each year? The implementation of compact townships — agglomeration of houses, hospitals, schools, markets, rural industries and local government units with all basic services for almost 20,000 people — might appear a resolution of the problem. But there is a catch. Viewing compact townships as issues takes human subjects and their relation to non-human entities out of our imagination. This ought not to be as a shift from humanist to post-humanist philosophy asking for a mutually beneficial human-non-human relationship. Recent public responses in line with this ideation, Palli Janapad project, remain an end in itself by privileging the human over depleting non-human entities. This is arguably a top-down design intervention of the real estate kind imported to the village form the city. The issue common in these cases is their colonising the rural context, Gram Bangla, that would set in for advancing economic growth. During Bangladesh’s progress, we note that the urban fabric of expanding large cities continues to colonise Gram Bangla, the city’s rural hinterland, bio-region. We, however, have not yet attempted a historicallyspecific and evidence-based theoretical articulation of the consequences of urbanisation for future policies. The draft National Urban Sector Policies 2011 and Bangladesh Delta Plan 2015 or the city-specific Dhaka Structure Plan 2016–2035 identify an ‘urban sector’ but ignore the emerging urban scenario. An absolute geographical imagination arising from a separation of the places of urban centres from villages within an undifferentiated space, aerial differentiation between urban and rural areas, underpinning these discourses, becomes obsolete. Instead, a relational reconciliation of space and place, an alternative geographical imagination, sets our path to reimagine the urban through its colonising Gram Bangla. A deep-rooted humanism, evolving from the Bengal delta’s primordial people-water-land relationship over centuries, had been instrumental in forming the Bengali psyche. However, the existence of eternal, isolated and self-sufficient villages in gram Bangla in forming the Bengali psyche is now a myth, mere memories. Tagore’s imagined ‘Sonar Bangla’ remains virtual whose romanticised representation inspires us even today, albeit for aestheticised or commodified appropriation in our everyday lives. In reality, Gram Bangla today is connected with the global flows, networks and movements beyond the national boundary just as cities and towns are. Remittance inflows to Gram Bangla, from home and abroad, have partly contributed to improving people’s material base, home improvement, although a ‘snake and ladder’ condition continues affecting the rural poor’s fate and fortune. Foreseeing the future stagnant agricultural growth, the state’s promotion of the off-farm activities and establishing growth centres in connection with physical infrastructure and social services have for long become a policy agenda for ‘de-agrarianising rural setting’. The outcomes of these policies are reflected in the declining rate of rural poverty although rural landlessness continues to grow. The urban-rural binary has been the bedrock of development planning in Bangladesh. Dominant disciplines and respective expertise for fiscal allocation and sectoral investments and local governance thrive on this binary. Progress in human well-being as the driving aim, arguably the three key areas where development initiatives get marked are changes in the demographic, geographic, and poverty percentile figures of urban and rural areas. Although these figures add to the official records, the urban realm has gradually transformed in accommodating city’s ascribed role as the ‘engines of growth’, desperately sought after by a neo-liberal economy by marking its ‘footprints’ far beyond cities and towns. Two facets of transformation of the national urban realm lead to our rethinking ‘urbaneness’ for re-imagining the urban in Bangladesh. First, within urban centres, an agglomeration economy has deeply entrenched in large cities, especially Dhaka, while most of the remaining cities or towns, or both, and rural areas come under the influence of an urbaneness by affecting people’s living and livelihood. An earlier bounded urban is replaced by an unbound, flowing and connected nature of the emerged urban with increasing urban- rural linkages. Second, outside urban centres, the relentless pursuit of growth makes the spatial confinement of large cities blurred, porous, and spillover beyond the official urban areas with harmful consequences to the nature. In the process, rivers are polluted and encroached on; agricultural land, wetlands, and forests are depleted to make ways for expanding industries, resorts, power plants, etc. As a result, pre-existing ecological balance is made vulnerable for opting an alleged human well-being at the cost of non-human entities. The dialectical outcome of these two strands of transformation is arguably a third kind beyond the urban-rural binary: the urban fabric’s progressive colonisation of the rural area. This local outcome under the rubrics of ‘planetary urbanisation’ is not unique to Bangladesh except its historical and contextual specificities. But government policy documents have failed to register these transformations by an expanding urbanisation for which they wish to restore ‘balance’ and achieve a ‘hierarchy’ within urban centres. A notional reference to the urban has been frequent yet remains an unanalysed abstraction without exception. For example, the 2015 BBS research monograph, ‘Changing Patterns of Urbanisation in Bangladesh: An Analysis of Census Data’, exposes the policy ambivalence to an emerging urban. Its dated conceptualisation of the urban in an absolute sense and episodic tracing of urbanisation fails to grasp ground realities of the changing patterns of urbanisation in Bangladesh. Spectres of the Chicago School Sociology continue validating an alleged ‘urban definitional consistency’ through a set of demographic indicators: size, density and (social) heterogeneity. The urban attains a separate existence for official enumeration based on the UN endorsed administrative area criteria. The urban in the monograph refers to the bounded administrative area, urban centres, whose ‘urbaneness’ is determined by the following selected six criteria: density, population, literacy, access to tap water, sanitation, and electricity connections in the dwelling. One can argue about the applicability of these indicators to the rural areas as well to measure their increase. With evidence supporting their increase, with the exception of replacing tap water with tube wells, what restricts the rural areas categorised as urban areas is not made distinct. Behind validating an urban-rural binary lies the notion of community despite its scrutiny as a distinct phenomenon unique only in an urban area. The major finding draws our attention: only seven, mostly major city corporations, out of 424 urban centres qualify to have an urbaneness while 206 do not qualify for not fulfilling all six criteria except population. These findings justify provisioning non-existing physical services in slums identified as the ‘poor settlements’. This option becomes inevitable in the way the BBS looks and interprets ‘place’. The BBS prioritises the selective objective attributes of place without considering what these attributes signify subjectively, ie what places mean for people. For example, a house in a slum can be identified as a shack in terms of the absence of objective attributes of an ‘adequate shelter’. A collection of similar shacks will signify the existence of a slum, requiring external intervention for what it lacks. Missing in this myopic view is what role this shack plays or how have dwellers value this shack in their living and livelihood to engage in cooperation, negotiation or contestation for accessing resources. When objective signifiers turn to signification, the revelation of slum’s meaning to people, dwellers’ capacity and constraints in living a life they value by producing and appropriating a ‘social space’ attains focus. Unfortunately, an absence of this way of appreciating the role of slums in determining the urbaneness of urban centres has also been evident in explaining the changing profile of slums in Bangladesh, another vector defining the urban in Bangladesh. The Census of Slums and Floating Population 2014 reports a 77 per cent increase in slum households, while the 366 per cent increase in the number of slums in Bangladesh compared with the 1997 findings. As ‘large slums’ with more than 100 households are decreasing because of periodic evictions, a reverse relationship between the slum sizes and households emerge: 4 per cent of the large slums accommodate 53 per cent of all slum households in Bangladesh while 53 per cent of all slums are found ‘small’, each with less than 10 households. Dhaka Metro Region (1528 sq km) manifests its core and periphery under an increasing agglomeration of industries. At the national level, Dhaka reportedly accommodates around 20 per cent population in 1 per cent of land while contributing more than a third of the GDP. The core central zone in the recent Dhaka Structure Plan 2016–2035 is surrounded by five peripheral zones in outlining a bounded metro region. Dhaka explicates this core-periphery phenomenon, after French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, through the implosion-explosion in the following ways. The first is an implosion by erasing informality and restructuring by densification of its urban core area. The periodic eviction of large informal settlements resulting in the formation of small slum settlements in its periphery: progressive splintering of slums from core public to peripheral private land leads to a 14 types of tenure while the restructuring of the existing residential and industrial areas takes place through densification and relocation respectively. Densification of the planned residential areas and relocation/conversion of Hazaribagh tanneries and Tejgaon industrial area exemplify this trend — a buyout real estate sector cash in this twin-track transformation. The second is an explosion of Dhaka’s five peripheral zones by accommodating informality and extending urbaneness beyond its official bounded area. A critical reading of the DSP alongside the Census of Slums and Floating Population 2014 confirms the splintering slums phenomenon during 1997–2014. Linked to it is the DSP’s demand-driven formal low-income housing supply proposal by denying the existence of informal settlements. It, thereby, dispenses with the formal-informal housing binary by intensifying the commodification of housing with the following implications. The first is pushing poor settlements in private land to the peripheral zones with nearby industries contributing to the reduction in labour reproduction costs. The second is peripheral agricultural land and homesteads coming under the future development zones where the original owners will be given an option of ‘relocation through dispossession’. The reimagined urban ‘denies autonomy to the adjectives of urban and rural’ in their making distinctive ways of life. Instead, it refers to a three-level social production of space for peoples living in an urban society. The space of this urban society is socially produced, and is not a thing, but an outcome of the interactions of the following three moments of production — first, the production of the material setting where people get engaged in everyday spatial practices for living; second, the production of knowledge where design and planning discourses are dictated by the economic motives in collusion with the state; and third, the production of meaning whereby people attach specific significance to spaces for everyday experience in differences. An empirical validation of their dialectical explication is beyond the scope of this paper. Having said that, urban society is predicated on the social organisation of space across an urban continuum. An urban age view, on the other hand, refers to the demographic transition to the urban areas within an urban-rural binary. Urbanity or urbaneness is explored in terms of demographic indicators. The objective is to identify the ‘other population’ living in enclaves, confined settlements lacking physical attributes. Hence the ‘urban poor’ living in ‘poor settlements’, slums, are identified and isolated through mapping for targeted intervention. This is a crisis management approach apparently driven by human well-being goals. Missing here is the urban poor and poor settlements’ position in the broader urbanisation process with which their derivation and claim to resources are entangled. It opts for an ad hoc resolution of the problem on a given location in time. The possible alternative path, to move from urban age to urban society, puts people first by banking on their often elusive social capital. Social capital at the grass roots is either repressed by the elite or (mis)appropriated for project implementation. People’s self-reconfiguration of social capital, among others, in aiding their co-inhabiting with the environment remains an incomplete project to reckon with in Bangladesh as nowhere in the world so many people live in such a small area. But, how an immanent social capital at the grass roots, subject formation, would guide people’s taking responsibility for action affecting the environment as much their mediating and resisting the profit-driven harmful public-private sector action remains untapped by the state. There are, however, events of resistances by the people. Reimagining the existing urban-rural binary is a means to initiate an immanent subject formation for a resilient Bangladesh, especially when the adverse effects of natural disasters and climate change erode the age-old barrier between the bounded urban and the unbounded rural. Climate refugees, for example, have for long been arriving at large in major cities being dispossessed from their ancestral rural habitat. Local practice and expressions of politics, citizenship, and festivities have developed from the dispersed nature of homesteads in the historic formation of settlements within a unique deltaic physiognomy of Bangladesh. Social formation arising out of a pre-existing agrarian formation in Bangladesh has later shaped the stratified social structure in urban centres through the episodic continuity of centralised administration, surplus extraction and rural-urban migration. Since the colonial rule, Bangladesh’s graduation from a location of raw agriculture export industries, and later import-substitution industries, to export-oriented industrialisation has led to a moment of social and spatial transformations on two accounts. First, nationwide networks of NGOs have effectively reconfigured grass-roots politics by pursuing a sense of inclusive citizenship, especially by empowering the poor rural women by social mobilisation and economic liberation. Second, pockets of social exclusion in the poor urban settlements, slums, while leading to urban poor’s disenfranchised citizenship, could not deter ushering in a new sense of grass-roots politics, mediated by their informal negotiations with the administration and political leaders, in accessing everyday items of collective consumptions. Cross-cutting issues of politics and citizenship for benefiting people’s everyday lives and livelihood are hardly confined discretely to the urban and rural areas: they are either everywhere or nowhere depending on how one views. The geographic space that we call Bangladesh has been bleeding by a growth-driven onslaught that could not spare the depleting non-human entities although succeeded in reducing human deprivation. But this space is all we have for dwelling. The lure of further growth will continue because of the cheap cost of labour supplied by this space. Space and its dwellers have so far been backing this growth by an urbanrural and a formal-informal binaries. But intrinsic values of the place and its meaning to people have missed policy attention. A shift of attention from an absolute space to a relational place-space reconciliation opens a window to consider human in relation to non-human entities. The reimagined urban — the three-level production of social space — is a heuristic device, conceptual framework to make this shift happen. A few dispute the human and non-human centred discourses having a common focus: appropriation of social capital in the immanent subject formation towards sustaining a renewed people- land-water relationship in the Bengal delta. A re-imagination of the urban imply these discourses premising in a post-humanist philosophy. Immanent subject formation creates a position that holds human responsible for action affecting the non-human realm: an evolving social consciousness sought to contain and counter the relentless advancement of a neo-liberal economy that puts a premium on growth and profit above all. This, however, is not an easy endeavour, whether in theory or practice. The future urban agenda has to make a choice between an urban age and urban society for dwelling. Let us wait and see what Habitat 3 conference has to say. Shayer Ghafur is a professor of architecture in Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
