Incrementalism, housing supply and city-making from below: learning from Khulna, Bangladesh

Incrementalism is a mode of self-help and continuing practice that is prevalent primarily in the Global South. It enables owner-builders to meet housing needs typically over an extended period of time as they can more conveniently manage the required resources. While (informal) tenure, materiality, and housing conditions have long been the focus of incremental housing scholarship, researchers are increasingly recognising the value of incrementalism’s metabolic interplay with broader urban processes. This paper complements these later works by qualitatively examining four dominant incremental housing pathways in the urban fringes of Khulna, Bangladesh: absentee landholding, makeshift sheltering, speculative land disposal and informal brokerage. Empirical evidence suggests that a variety of actors, primarily motivated by land speculation, participate in these incremental housing pathways. While the implementation of the official plan for Khulna’s peri-urban areas is delayed, I argue that these actors coproduce a complex housing market as well as a self-help city in which urban institutions play more passive and reactionary roles. The findings contribute to rethinking the self-organising logic of urban expansion in many Southern cities, which is often centred on urban land at the crossroads of institutional capacity deficit, speculative housing demand and supply, and informal-formal hybridity.