Commoning the city for survival in urban informal settlements

Abstract

There is a resurgent interest in the study of ‘urban commons’ in critical geography scholarship as a way to reimagine cities beyond the pervasive neoliberal framing. Inspired by this body of work, this paper explores the processes through which marginalised groups, despite their many socio-economic limitations, negotiate and transform their sparse urban resources into ‘commons’ to survive in cities. We use qualitative interviews and participant observations to examine two case studies of informal settlements in Dhaka and Khulna city in Bangladesh. The ‘commons identikit’ is used to analyse how informal settlers negotiate survival by enacting particular social relationships among themselves and beyond, ensuring access, use, and exchange of materials and ideas, as well as distributing care, benefits, and responsibility of their commons. By bringing a commons perspective to the pre-existing and emerging local tactics, we highlight the logics and relationality that help these communities make efforts of collective survival and aspire to a better future. We argue that there are significant practical benefits to recognising the self-organising logics of the precariously positioned communities in the city. Furthermore, commoning the city constitutes a major extension of the theorisation of urban informal settlements and the city as urban commons.