City of Desire - by Tanzil Shafique (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In this major open access contribution to Global South urban studies, Tanzil Shafique offers a new way of knowing and engaging with the most common urban environment in the Global South - informal settlements, or "slums".

Informal settlements house more than a billion people now and will house three billion people by 2050. Yet they remain marginalised in urban theory and practice, and most projects to improve them fail due to a lack of knowledge of the ongoing processes that build them.

Through a detailed case study of Karail, the largest informal settlement in Bangladesh, Shafique offers ground-breaking insights into the productionof informal urbanism through a brand-new approach rooted in deep ethnography and spatial mapping. Shafique explores, for the first time, the many different desires of settlement-dwellers and how these drive everyday urban change. He also offers brilliantly innovative recommendations for the policy-making, upgrading and management of both existing and future informal settlements.

Written in an engaging narrative that weaves local stories with theoretical insight, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in international development, urban studies, sociology, and architecture.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Sheffield.

Review Quotes

After all this time in urban studies, we still know very little about cities such as Dhaka, which are home to a significant portion of the world's population. This lively and thoughtful book gives us insight into the collective lives being forged in such cities and does so by providing a complex political analysis of community and state.
Ananya Roy, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Geography and Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, USA

The arguments presented in the book, using a lucid narrative style, illuminate an understanding of Korali beyond the usual binaries and categories constructed through the normative taxonomies. Instead, Shafique provides a unique kaleidoscopic view of the adjustments, tactics, strategies, resistances, protocols, and maneuvered process by which the settlement is made as well as remade every day. This is a reading that does not privileges any one disciplinary lens and instead collapses, intersects, folds, interrogates hybridizes and synthesizes multiple perspectives to present a convincing way of seeing a form of urbanism in which half the urban population on the planet will possibly settle in the coming three decades.
Rahul Mehrotra, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Harvard University, USA

This 'biography' of Korail is a welcome addition to the relatively few in-depth studies of informal settlements. It challenges readers to see not only these settlements but also cities differently, "at least enough to imagine alternative futures for them." That better serve their needs and concerns within the huge risks brought by climate change
David Satterthwaite, Senior Associate, IIED and Visiting Professor, University College London, UK

About the Author

Tanzil Shafique teaches at the University of Sheffield, UK, and is an Associate of the Urban Institute there. He is the Convenor of the the Southern Theorising Group (STingG) as well as co-lead of the Sheffield Design Lab. Tanzil's research looks at informal cities and their adaptation to climate change, participatory spatial practices and decolonial/pluriversal thought. He recently won significant funding from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for a wetland revitalisation project. He also runs the Platform for Housing Justice, a grassroots activism infrastructure. He is co-author of Off-Grid Toilets (Altrim, 2022) and Atlas of Informal Settlements (Bloomsbury, 2023).