Private Low-Income Housing in Dhaka and Mumbai

我的博士研究由三个核心概念构成：住房、劳动力和城市空间。全球南方的城市被理解为“贫民窟”和“高层建筑”之间的矛盾类型学的混合体，这些类型学是由全球化、反乌托邦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地点，特别是考虑到农村劳动力向城市迁移的主导地位。我的博士学位题为“住宿城市”，探讨了临时住宿的新兴形式和过程，如宿舍，食堂住房，工作居住出租，以及达卡和孟买低收入移民工人的房间共享。我进行了12个月的人种学研究，包括采访，参与者观察，并跟踪多个国家和非国家行为者。利用我现有的研究，我的博士后工作将扩大住宿的概念，作为一个创新的透镜，以了解低收入私人住房的复杂性，在历史，劳动力和空间的背景下。作为ESRC奖学金的一部分，我将我的项目作为三篇期刊文章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。这些文章将直接来自博士研究，并探讨当地劳动力的叙述和全球南方城市的租赁住房建设。在我的博士学位期间，我通过三个主要方面展示了住宿在城市中和城市中的重要性：首先是“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“谁建”，并揭示了租赁住房的建设和管理过程是偶然的，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组装。第三，我通过追踪街头收税员的角色来研究“谁统治”，以显示国家实践的任意性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将南南框架作为建立欧美霸权之外的理论的出发点，为全球关于南亚城市化的辩论做出了独特的贡献。通过对城市住宿的关键关注，这项研究进一步促进了关于临时，不稳定和短暂的建筑环境如何在街道层面相互连接和组装的学术知识。除了巩固博士研究，我还将在达卡、孟买和剑桥与学者、政策制定者、非政府组织从业人员举办传播研讨会。这将使我能够最大限度地扩大影响范围，并通过为未来的临时住房研究制定资助计划来扩大我的研究。ESRC博士后奖学金将为我提供一个重要的平台，以提高我的研究技能，使出版，赠款写作和公众参与活动，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.