Infrastructures of Legitimacy
A design-research project exploring the intersection of mobility, labour and urban informality in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The project investigates Dhaka's contested sites of informality, exploring how the urban poor in the city's largest so-called 'informal settlement', Korail Bosti, appropriate space in their struggle for urban citizenship.
Understanding informality not simply as a spatial category but as an organising logic that pervades throughout contemporary urbanism, the project deploys a mobile lens in an attempt to desegregate the informal settlement both literally and discursively.
By focusing not on the settlement per se but rather on its entangled relationship to the city as a whole, we can reveal city-wide dynamics of interdependency between disparate locations and people, requiring us to expand our focus from places to spatial processes and socio-material flows.
Design experiments around forms and scales of intervention speculate on the different outcomes of 'top-down', participatory and spontaneous urban development.
The project proposes an 'infrastructure of citizenship', addressing first the role of (im)mobility in the production of urban equalities. Drawing on existing street-widening practices, urban corridors are designated across Korail to facilitate the delivery of vital infrastructures, access to emergency services and integration into a district-wide cycle-rickshaw route.
Existing street widening practices in Korail are incentivised and often funded by local NGOs and can facilitate neighbourhood-wide infrastructure initiatives, from water and gas to sewage and refuse disposal.
A rickshaw transport hub provides formal accommodation, storage and administrative facilities for Korail’s rickshaw workers, a harbour for boat taxis and a public space for street vendors. The rickshaw hub establishes a space of legitimacy for Dhaka’s so called ‘informal' workers.
The final phase speculates on the spaces across Korail made vacant by the relocation of rickshaw garages. It proposes the creation of new public buildings, from schools and nurseries to clinics and libraries, which can make vital contributions to the quality of life in Korail and enhance opportunities for its underserved residents.
