Private Low-Income Housing in Dhaka and Mumbai

我的博士研究是由三个核心概念构成的：住房、劳动力和城市空间。全球南部的城市被理解为“贫民窟”和“高楼”之间矛盾类型的混合体，这些类型是由全球想象力、反乌托邦的愿景和城市转型的偶然实践塑造的。这些城市是调查复杂和矛盾的住房过程的重要场所，特别是考虑到农村向城市的劳动力流动占主导地位。我的博士学位名为《住宿之城》，探讨了在达卡和孟买为低收入外来务工人员提供临时住所的新兴形式和流程，如宿舍、食堂住房、工作住宅租赁和合住。我进行了为期12个月的人种学研究，包括采访、参与者观察和跟踪多个国家和非国家行为者。在我现有研究的基础上，我的博士后工作将扩展住宿的概念，将其作为一个创新的视角，以了解处于历史、劳动力和空间背景下的低收入私人住房的复杂性。作为ESRC奖学金的一部分，我将把我的项目作为三篇期刊论文和一本书的手稿提交给领先的大学出版社和同行评议的城市研究和地理期刊。这些文章将直接来源于博士研究，并探索关于当地劳动力和在全球南方城市建造租赁住房的叙述。在我的博士学位中，我通过三个主要方面展示了住宿对城市的重要性：第一，谁住，考察农民工的生活经历，以及他们的工作和生活条件。其次，我分析了“由谁建造”，并揭示了租赁住房的建造和管理过程是临时的、不稳定的，并通过当地建筑商、分包商和调解人之间的各种形式的合作进行组装。第三，我通过追踪街头收税员的角色来考察谁来执政，以展示国家实践的专断性质和国家与社会关系的自下而上的塑造。这个关于私人低收入住房的项目通过采用南南框架作为起点，建立欧美霸权之外的理论，为关于南亚城市化的全球辩论做出了独特的贡献。通过对城市住宿的批判性关注，这项研究进一步加深了关于临时的、不稳定的和临时的建筑环境是如何在街道层面上相互联系和组装的学术知识。除了巩固博士研究，我还将与达卡、孟买和剑桥的学者、政策制定者和非政府组织从业人员一起举办传播研讨会。这将使我能够最大限度地扩大影响范围，并通过为未来关于临时住房的研究制定拨款建议来扩大我的研究范围。ESRC博士后奖学金将为我提供一个重要的平台，以增强我的研究技能，使我能够出版、撰写赠款和公共参与活动，以建立我在学术界的工作和职业生涯。

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.