Private Low-Income Housing in Dhaka and Mumbai

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My PhD research was framed by three core concepts: housing, labour, and urban space. Cities in the Global South are understood as a mélange of paradoxical typologies between 'slums' and 'highrises' shaped by global imaginaries, dystopian visions and contingent practices of urban transformations. These cities are important sites for investigating the complex and contradictory processes of housing especially given the dominance of rural-urban labour migration. My PhD titled, 'The Accommodation City', explored the emerging forms and processes of temporary accommodation such as dormitories, mess housing, work-residence rentals, and room-sharing for low-income migrant workers in Dhaka and Mumbai. I conducted 12 months of ethnographic research including interviews, participant observation, and shadowing multiple state and non-state actors. Drawing on my existing research, my postdoctoral work will expand on the concept of accommodation as an innovative lens to understand the complexities of low-income private housing within contexts of situated histories, labour, and space. As a part of the ESRC fellowship, I am advancing my project as three journal articles and a book manuscript for submission to leading university presses and peer-reviewed urban studies and geography journals. These articles will derive directly from the PhD research, and explore narratives of local labour and building rental housing in cities of the Global South. In my PhD, I demonstrated how accommodation matters 'in'and 'for' cities through three main strands: first 'who lives', examining the lived experience of migrant workers, and their conditions of work and living. Second, I analysed 'who builds', and revealed that the processes of construction and management of rental housing are contingent,precarious, and assembled through various forms of cooperation between local builders, sub-contractors and mediators. Third, I examined 'who governs' by tracing the role of street-level tax collectors to show the arbitrary nature of state practice and the bottom-up shaping of state-society relationships. This project on private low-income housing makes a distinctive contribution to global debates on South Asian urbanism by engaging a South-South framework as a starting point to build theories outside the Euro-American hegemony. Through a critical focus on urban accommodations, this research furthers scholarly knowledge on how temporary, precarious, and transient built environments are interconnected and assembled at the street level. Apart from consolidating the PhD research, I will also conduct dissemination workshops with academics, policymakers, NGO practitioners in Dhaka, Mumbai, and Cambridge. This will allow me to maximise the reach and expand my research by developing grant proposals for future research on temporary housing. The ESRC postdoctoral fellowship will give me a crucial platform to build on my research skills, enable publishing, grant writing, and public engagement activities to establish my work and career in academia.