City of Desire

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, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) * City of Desire presents informality not as a rarity but as the condition of living in contemporary cities. The biography of the large settlement Korail in Dhaka situates the lived experience of informality in space and time. And what is Korail? Korail is a laboratory for understanding the works of power and its hold on people's lives. Korail is a critical perspective that reconnects critical theory to the lived experience of the city. Korail is also a metaphor standing for the inhabitation practices that sustain life in a precarious world. Shafique shows that amidst attempts to appropriate urban space, social life does not always follow the designs of power; instead, it is assembled from multiple desires. City of Desire strikes a hopeful note when it maps immanent solidarities that translate into political propositions, however ephemeral, and into collectives with the capacity to transform the fabric of Korail and its relation to the World through its multiple fragments. * Vanesa Castan Broto, University of Sheffield, UK * 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. -- Professor Rahul Mehrotra, Harvard University, USA A fine and nuanced reading of a place so particular yet so familiar across cities of the Global South, this is an invaluable addition to a growing body of urban work that insists on rooting itself in place before it travels conceptually to offer us new ways to think of all cities. A wonderful, layered, and engaging read, where the writer's love of place gets equal place as their rigorous analysis of its urban condition. -- Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements