Abstract
The study of urban poverty in Bangladesh has so far been patchy, often limited to collections of chapters (Islam, 2010; Rahman, 2011), or based on non-representative surveys (e.g. Islam et al., 1997; Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction (UPPR), 2010), or focused on municipal governance (Murtaza, 2002), or concerned primarily with Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital city (Afsar, 2000; Begum, 1999; Siddiqui et al., 2000, 2010). What is missing is commanding scholarship on the urbanization process – such as the ways in which Schandel (2009) and Lewis (2011) have studied Bangladesh’s historical and governance settings.
This is clearly acknowledged in Rahman’s (2011) commentary on the challenges of Bangladesh’s emerging urban future, stating that ‘… analytical understanding of this [rapid urbanisation] process … remains fragmented and policy responses sporadic’ (p. 3). Our own review of research, policy and action on urban poverty in the country also reveals a serious dearth of understanding and information on urban poverty in Bangladesh – causing consequent problems in developing adequate policy responses (Banks et al., 2011).
Against this backdrop, Shahadat Hossain’s aim to study Urban Poverty in Bangladesh: Slum Communities, Migration and Social Integration, has the bold ambition to fill some of the critical knowledge gaps. In particular, Hossain’s effort could be a step forward in addressing the neglect of urban poverty, as he aspires to examine urban poverty through the analytical lenses of slum communities, migration and social integration.
While the book’s ambition is intellectually justified and policy-relevant, its execution has been rather problematic, in spite of the author’s admirable personal efforts in data collection and analysis. I pick five key issues to elaborate, but others remain, such as the author’s neglect of specifying the year of data collection.
First, Hossain commits the same mistake that has been made consistently by many. Despite the title of Urban Poverty in Bangladesh, the book focuses in its entirety on urban poverty in Dhaka, thereby failing to address many important elements associated with migration and social integration in different urban contexts in the country. Clearly, Dhaka is not the only destination of migrations from rural Bangladesh, although its primacy is unquestionable. In percentage terms, 83.6% of Dhaka’s population are migrants, compared with 68% in Chittagong and around 50% in secondary cities (Rahman, 2011). Moreover, while urbanisation is faster in Dhaka than anywhere else, there are interesting surprises. For example, a new township called Noapara, located almost halfway between Khulna and Jessore, had emerged as a municipality even before being recognised as a Thana (sub-District). Its growth rate has been unprecedented, propelled by both push and pull factors. A number of new industries have been established, providing employment to people who have lost their previous livelihoods through extreme weather events (cyclones and saline intrusion) (Ahmed, 2008). These surprises correlate with the 2010 census findings: while the country’s overall annual population growth (2001–2011) was 1.34%, the population growth rate is considerably lower in the coastal region – in Barishal Division, it is zero, while in Khulna Division it is 0.6% (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), 2011). The implication is that the urbanization process, and thereby the distribution of urban poverty in Bangladesh, may be heading in a new direction. A book on urban poverty in Bangladesh would benefit from reference to urban areas beyond Dhaka.
Second, Hossain’s implicit generalisation of urban poverty in Dhaka in terms of slum communities lacks adequate detail. Let us present some statistics to illustrate. The Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2005 found that the incidence of poverty in Dhaka is 20.2% (about 4 million), whereas the Centre for Urban Studies’ (CUS) 2005 census of slum clusters in Dhaka found that the share of population living in slum clusters is 3.4 million (Islam et al., 2006). This suggests that over half a million urban poor people remain unaccounted for in the CUS census. Apart from the usual problems of incompatible measurement of urban poverty in HIES and CUS surveys, an important indication of the whereabouts of this missing population is that, between 1996 and 2005, the share of people living in private slums rose from 48.8% to 70.3% (Angeles et al., 2009). Privately built low-income settlements appear to evolve more quickly than illegally occupied squatter settlements. Those familiar with Dhaka’s ever-changing private slums would agree that within a decade or so, most private slum dwellings become permanent, rented structures, which are not slum-like, although the tenants are on low incomes. Having ignored the important variable of ‘tenure type’ (e.g. between squatter settlements and privately built low-income settlements, or between tenants or dwelling owners), Hossain’s sampling frame has neglected an important dynamic that underpins the development of Dhaka’s low-income settlements and housing options for the urban poor.
Third, Chapter 3 seems more concerned with a host of theories – ‘deprivation’, ‘entitlement’, ‘marginality’ and ‘culture of poverty’ – than with developing a theory of ‘social integration of migrants’ as the book aims. Not only would the latter have done justice to the central concern of the book, it would have also prevented the author’s analysis from becoming merely a compilation of features and characteristics of selected urban poor settlements, thus making the preceding discussion on theories rather irrelevant. Moreover, in his choice of theories, Hossain seems to have relied on contested theories and, in other cases, to have misinterpreted some. For example, the author seems to have misinterpreted Perlman (2004), whose arguments aimed to dispel the ‘myth’ of marginality – that the urban poor are not so much marginalised but integrated into all dimensions of society in negative ways. Moreover, although he seems to rely heavily on ‘the culture of poverty’, this is also frequently contested. For example, Sen (2006) has been critical about the growing tendency to blame the predicament of the poor on the basic deficiencies and hard-to-reform nature of poor people’s own regressive cultures, which supposedly makes it futile to try to help them. Sen is in favour of celebrating the creativity of all – the people and those external agencies who deny the apparently benign slogan ‘culture matters’. Hossain has suggested the opposite, by stigmatising poor people as ‘… stressed and … intolerant of their families and communities’ (p. 9), and as ‘victims of their circumstances’ (p. 189). Such statements evoke negative generalisations of the urban poor that do little to dispel the anti-urban poor stance that exists in Bangladesh and amongst the proponents of cultural explanations.
Fourth, even if we acknowledge that the book is a study of features of urban poverty in Dhaka, the interpretation of some of these features is often misleading. In some cases, the causalities claimed seem tenuous, and that some important distinctions are missing also make the argument unconvincing in places. An example of poor causality is the relationship between political participation and habitat type (i.e. temporary and permanent dwellings). Instead of tying the issue of political participation with important variables such as tenure type (noted above), such narrowly defined causality fails to lead to any policy-relevant findings. Similarly, the study can be criticised for missing some important distinctions. There seems a contradiction, for example, in the book referring primarily to the urban poor as ‘migrants’, at the same time as indicating their permanency as city residents, with the mean length of stay among his respondents being over 17 years. Even dwellers of squatter settlements claim ‘permanent’ ownership of their land if they had stayed there for more than 12 years. The author seems to be validating the social division between permanent citizens and migrants, rather than truly investigating social integration as it intends.
Fifth, under the heading of ‘Poor migrants and social integration into the city’ (Chapter 6) – the reader would expect a commanding analysis of how poor migrants succeed or fail to socially integrate, leading to the identification of practices that are politically supportable and policy-relevant. Instead, the analysis is loaded with references to dated literature. Hossain seems to be mainly concerned about whether the statements made correspond to what has been said by others in regards to Dhaka or elsewhere, such as this: ‘… a similar pattern is found in India by Oberai et al. (1989)’ (p. 149). Instead of imposing the author’s own intellectual signature, this penultimate chapter is a cumbersome read, characterised by repetition and more general statistics related to elsewhere. This represents a missed opportunity in terms of synthesizing his key findings.
Hossain raises the expectation that urban poverty may be an experience that people should not be subject to, and that his book will present examples indicating that there are elements of ‘social integration’ among the urban poor for policies to build on. This plants hope in the minds of readers sympathetic to the vulnerable lives of millions of poor people today and the millions who will join them in the near future. Given the rate at which the absolute number of poor people living in urban areas is growing, and the dire predictions that climate change will send millions more poor people from rural to urban areas (Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh (GoB), 2010), it is expected that poverty will become an urban problem in Bangladesh by 2040 (Banks et al., 2011). Yet, the book ends by giving the reader a false conclusion. While the intellectual community has rejected the notion of a ‘culture of poverty’ as an explanation of why people remain poor, Hossain has built his arguments on this obsolete notion. Those working closely with poor people in Bangladesh seem to feel the opposite. Regardless of the chronic insecurity that characterises the lives of the urban poor, they observe the innovation and adaptation of the urban poor, who develop various coping strategies and practices that help them secure livelihoods, raise their children and remain as healthy as they can. The intellectual community has a responsibility to examine what these people are doing and extract lessons from these practices in a way that shows policy makers and agencies seeking to help poor people ‘what works in poor urban contexts’. The book has not lived up to this expectation.