"Worlding" Bangladeshi urbanism through water

Abstract

This essay explores how water shapes (imaginaries of) Bangladeshi urbanism. While images of floods and waterlogging have long contributed to a developmentalist representation of Bangladesh, contemporary trends in Bangladeshi urbanism are increasingly embracing water as a vantage point for envisioning a world-class urban future. In this essay, we explore the relationship between waterscapes and practices of "worlding". Focusing on Dhaka, we highlight the tension between the ways in which water is made part of certain "urban views" and the actual practices and movements through which people at the margins navigate the ever-shifting boundary between land and water. We conclude that water helps address attention to the processual and emergent qualities of urbanism, as the inherent wobbliness of its flows and excesses continuously work to destabilize static perspectives.