Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses

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Subject: Deleuze × Subject: informal settlements × Subject: urban design ×

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    Desiring Karail: Morphogenesis of an informal settlement in Dhaka
    Shafique, Tanzil Idmam ( 2021)
    Informal settlements currently house more than a billion people and will house a billion more by 2030. They are pervasive, expanding and persistent. Some of them have slum conditions while others do not. Often described as ‘spontaneous’ or ‘autonomous’, they are produced without the explicit urban design mechanism of the state. The changes in urban form in these places suggest the existence of particular processes of design and production. Understanding such processes underlying the morphogenesis—the development of urban form—is the central inquiry of this research. Moreover, the research aims to articulate the dynamic forces that enable or constrain the production processes. To do so, the thesis investigates Karail, which has emerged as the largest informal settlement in Dhaka over the last 40 years. Spread over an area of about 35 hectares, it is a dense agglomeration with a population of more than 250,000. Even without state planning and maintenance, functioning neighbourhoods with a characteristic urban form has emerged. The question is how. Employing a mixed-method research framework, which included multi-scalar mapping, in-depth observation and oral histories of placemaking, the thesis has interrogated the morphogenesis by tracing morphological change, informal rules used and the agents involved. It analysed the underlying forces—the desires—shaping the urban processes. Assemblage thinking, derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari has been used to produce narratives of Karail’s informal morphogenesis in terms of the urban form, its uses and the control of the urban production. Beyond the notion of ‘self-organization’, the concluding analysis pointed towards heterogeneous formative processes—a mix of individualised, collectivised and syndicated forms of organization. The concomitant entanglements of power between the State, NGOs, the surrounding formal neighbourhoods and the residents were of different orientations as well, often in alignment and in contradiction with each other. The thesis shows how the urban morphogenesis under investigation in Karail works as a sociospatial assembling held together by different desires, themselves appearing from within a landscape of narratives, capacities and imaginaries. It ends with a speculative impact of the findings on policy-making, upgrading and management of existing informal settlements and the episteme of urban design for future cities.