“The organised encroachment of the powerful”—Everyday practices of public space and water supply in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper investigates everyday struggles in claiming access to public space and water supply in a low-income settlement of Dhaka, Bangladesh. It looks at the rationality, processes and outcomes of informal negotiations. The empirical findings confirm the contested nature of access to public space and water supply and demonstrate how negotiations in an unbalanced power structure guarantee privileged access for a few local political leaders based on social and political relationships. This is at the cost of the exclusion of the majority. Such an “organised encroachment of the powerful” can be understood as an addition to Bayat's notion of a counter politics, the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary.” This paper advocates the need for complete understanding of context-specific power structures as this may help to reduce the threat of theoretical overgeneralisation and promote a more inclusive and just approach to urban planning.