City of Desire: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh

In this major open access contribution to Global South urban studies, Tanzil Shafique offers a new way of knowing and engaging with the most common urban environment in the Global South - informal settlements, or ＂slums＂.

Informal settlements house more than a billion people now and will house three billion people by 2050. Yet they remain marginalised in urban theory and practice, and most projects to improve them fail due to a lack of knowledge of the ongoing processes that build them.

Through a detailed case study of Karail, the largest informal settlement in Bangladesh, Shafique offers ground-breaking insights into the production of informal urbanism through a brand-new approach rooted in deep ethnography and spatial mapping. Shafique explores, for the first time, the many different desires of settlement-dwellers and how these drive everyday urban change. He also offers brilliantly innovative recommendations for the policy-making, upgrading and management of both existing and future informal settlements.

Written in an engaging narrative that weaves local stories with theoretical insight, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in international development, urban studies, sociology, and architecture.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Sheffield.

Tanzil Shafique teaches at the University of Sheffield and is an Associate of the Urban Institute. He is the Convenor of the the Southern Theorising Group (STingG), as well as co-leads Sheffield DesignLab. Tanzil’s research looks at informal cities and their adaptation to climate change, participatory spatial practices and decolonial/pluriversal thought. He recently won half a million pounds from UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for a wetland revitalisation project. He also runs Platform for Housing Justice, a grassroot activism infrastructure. He is co-author of Off-Grid Toilets (Altrim, 2022) and Atlas of Informal Settlements (Bloomsbury, 2023).