(En)countering (im)permanence: marginal home-making as critical urban practice

In light of the substantial retrenchment of State involvement in pro-poor housing in the Global South, urban informal settlements have become home to half of its population. Conversely, post-independence Bangladesh has sustained a trajectory of providing subsidized housing for the marginalized demographics. In stark contrast to their predominantly informal habitation, the governmental approach in Bangladesh favors the provision of permanent housing/houses as its principal mode of delivery. Using a critical lens, we attempt to encounter this tendency within urban (neoliberal) discourses that view permanence as ‘the answer’ to marginal people’s home-making. Taking Bastuhara and Guccha-gram—two formal sector resettlement projects from Khulna, Bangladesh, we seek to identify marginal people’s alternative mode(s) of urban home-making, especially against the backdrop of the formal sector’s fondness for permanence. We argue that the entire housing scenario is founded on various conditions of ‘in-betweenness’, deliberately constructed by the state (and its colonia-influenced bureaucratic apparatus) that it uses for political control and own legitimization. In response, the displaced’s home-making practices instigate counter-acts in two different forms of in-betweenness—spatial and non-spatial temporalities and non-permanence. The grassroots politics and their alternative spatial practices resemble moments of counter-urbanism by working at the permanence-temporality intersection through their nuanced and silent acts of occupation/encroachment but without actually resisting the state's modus operandi.