Abstract
<p>With many cities in the Global South experiencing immense growth in informal settlements, city authorities frequently try to assert control over these settlements and their inhabitants through coercive measures such as threats of eviction, exclusion, blocked access to services and other forms of structural violence. Such coercive control is legitimized through the discursive formation of informal settlements as criminal and unsanitary, and of the residents as migrants and as temporary and illegitimate settlers. Using findings from ethnographic research carried out in two informal settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this article explores how informal settlement residents engage with and resist territorial stigma in a rapidly growing Southern megacity. Findings show residents resist stigmatising narratives of neighbourhood blame by constructing counternarratives that frame informal settlements as a “good place for the poor.” These place-based narratives emerge from shared experiences of informality and associational life in a city where such populations are needed yet unwanted. While residents of these neighbourhoods are acutely aware of the temporariness and illegality of unauthorised settlements, these narratives produce solidarities to resist eviction and serve to legitimise their claim to the city.</p>
Highlights
IntroductionOne in every four urban dwellers lives in some form of informal settlement (UN-Habitat, 2015)
Across the world, one in every four urban dwellers lives in some form of informal settlement (UN-Habitat, 2015)
In cities segregated by the unequal geographies of formal and informal, such territorial stigma serves as an instrument to Social Inclusion, 2020, Volume 8, Issue 1, Pages 55–65 maintain hegemonic control through actively producing and reproducing geographies of difference and maintaining spatial and social division (Ingen, Sharpe, & Lashua, 2018)
Summary
One in every four urban dwellers lives in some form of informal settlement (UN-Habitat, 2015) These settlements, commonly referred to as ghettoes, slums, refugee camps or squatter settlements, comprise the majority of the urban population in many megacities of the Global South and are a vital part of the economy and social life of those cities. Discourses of vilification consisting of deeply discrediting narratives that circulate in political, bureaucratic and journalistic fields produce the dominant imaginings of urban poor neighbourhoods (Butler, 2019; Parker & Karner, 2010; Wacquant, 2008) Such narratives portray informal settlement residents as undesirable in the city, and systematically exclude them from essential urban amenities and opportunities including access to employment, education, and medical care (Keene & Padilla, 2014). Through territorial stigmatisation informal settlement residents become an “obnoxious and repugnant other, always underserving and tainted” (Auyero, 1999, p. 65), an out-of-place population to be removed from the city
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