Book review: Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh: The Production of Counterspace

Book review: Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh: The Production of Counterspace

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Reviewed by Lipon Mondal

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21 Jan 2025, 10:56 am

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Book cover: Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh: The Production of Counterspace

Book review: Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh: The Production of Counterspace

Lutfun Nahar Lata, Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh: The Production of Counterspace, Abingdon: Routledge, 2023; 206 pp.: ISBN: 9781032395173, £39.99 (pbk); ISBN: 9781032395159, £125.00 (hbk); ISBN: 9781003350095, £35.99 (eBook)

Lutfun Nahar Lata’s book, Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh, contributes to the ever-growing literature on urban informality, spatial justice, urban governance and gender inequality. This book examines how street vendors in urban Bangladesh experience livelihood challenges such as restricted access to public space while interacting with urban governance such as the elite-centric order of urban planning. It explores the everyday politics of survival of the urban poor: how the poor negotiate with formal and informal urban authorities to operate informal businesses using public space in Dhaka, how they create counterspace to earn their livelihoods and how they experience eviction, exclusion, marginality and gender inequality in everyday life. It argues that the urban poor have a right to cities, to participate in decision-making and to occupy the city’s space to earn and sustain their livelihoods. This book’s arguments are built on empirical evidence collected from Dhaka – the capital city of Bangladesh and one of the world’s largest megacities – where nearly 300,000 people work as street vendors. This book consists of seven chapters: two of them (Chapters 2–3) are a literature review, three (Chapters 4–6) are analytical/empirical and two (Chapters 1, 7) are the Introduction and Conclusion.

Taking a critical lens, Chapter 2 (pp. 28–57) reviews the theoretical and empirical works regarding urban space, spatial domination, the right to the city, gender disparities and informality. This review identifies valuable concepts and theories to explain Dhaka’s realities of marginalised vending communities. Chapter 3 (pp. 58–84) also critically reviews relevant theories of power, governance and planning to understand the formal and informal governing logic of public space and resistance in Dhaka. This chapter explores the fact that due to the limited or no formal access to public space, the urban poor follow informal paths to access public space to earn their livelihoods. Chapter 4 (pp. 85–108) empirically analyses how the state and market actors design and enact elite-centred planning and policies to deny the poor people’s right to the city. Due to this exclusionary practice, the poor follow various informal paths to earn their livelihoods, including bribing the police, paying protection money to mastaans and linemen and serving political leaders. In this way, they produce and reproduce a counterspace to run and sustain their vending activities. The author borrows the idea of counterspace from Lefebvre (1991), which denotes a space created from below by a marginalised community to earn their livelihoods by challenging the hegemonic power of urban authorities. The author also uses Yiftachel’s (2009a, 2009b) idea of ‘grey space’ to understand the exploitative and oppressive relationships between vendors and urban authorities in Dhaka. Grey space is where formal strategies of urban domination meet informal mechanisms to govern the urban poor and protect the interests of the urban elites.

Chapter 5 (pp. 109–145) examines Dhaka’s vendors’ ability to deploy negotiation and resistance strategies to access public space and challenge hegemonic power to create the counterspace. They utilise diverse discursive power to access vending space, including political capital (involvement in local politics), economic ability (bribing the police or linemen) and social/kinship networks. They make an informal connection with the state and non-state power brokers to avoid eviction from their places and resist extortion to continue their vending jobs. According to the author (p. 109), vendors ‘pursue livelihoods in constant negotiation with other powerful actors’. The poor use various resistance strategies to access public space, including passive collective action, localised individual efforts, frequent change of vending spots and quiet encroachment of the vending space.

Chapter 6 (pp. 146–179) investigates enabling and constraining factors for poor women’s access to public space and participation in the informal economy. Compared to their male counterparts, women vendors feel more comfortable selling their goods in the parochial realm (within their neighbourhoods) than in the public realm. When women vendors are in public places for vending, they can avoid giving protection money to the police or linemen by demonstrating their vulnerable position in society. However, men cannot. The police do not even arrest women vendors as they do men vendors. Older women vendors do not face any problem in public spaces because it is socially acceptable. However, most women vendors face a triple burden (social stigma, religious barriers and patriarchy) while accessing the public space to earn an income. The author connects this reality with the idea of gendered space (Chant and Pedwell, 2008; Chen, 2001; Kabeer, 2008; Lata et al., 2021; White, 2017): a space where women fail to achieve their targeted goals as men do. Due to this gendered space, most poor women in Dhaka work as apparel and domestic workers rather than street vendors. Women vendors often encounter sexual harassment ‘due to breaking social and religious norms’ (p. 149). This book (Chapter 7) concludes by highlighting its major contributions: how the urban authorities govern the street vendors, how the street vendors create counterspace to sustain their urban life, how they are denied the right to the city and how women vendors are the victims of gender discrimination.

While Lata’s book extends our understanding of the informal dynamics of urban spatial politics, it leaves us with some limitations. First, the key arguments of this book are vague, self-contradictory and flawed. For example, Lata claims that the urban poor can access public space by defending themselves ‘against the state’s hegemonic production of space’ and producing a counterspace (p. 15). In defending this argument, the author provides evidence to show how the poor can access urban space by bribing the police, providing protection money to the mastaans or linemen and becoming a ruling party member. This is neither a defence against the hegemonic power of the state nor a site for counterspace. This must be a site of oppression and marginality on the horizontal line to reinforce the state’s hegemonic power on the vertical line. This marginality is clearly reflected in the author’s claims throughout the book (see also Mondal, 2024). One example is that ‘street vendors have very limited power to resist the demands of the state or local representatives of the state acting informally’ (p. 15). The author also argues that ‘street vendors govern their businesses quietly encroaching public space’ (p. 94). If ‘the police control most public space in Dhaka such as streets, footpaths, parks and other public squares’ (p. 96), how can the poor quietly occupy public space or create a counterspace? The author again argues that the urban poor have ‘agency to influence top-down governance mechanisms’ (p. 59). However, the book does not elaborate on this idea and provides little evidence to support this claim.

My review also explores whether applying Yiftachel’s (2009a, 2009b) idea of grey space to explain the marginal position of Dhaka’s vendors is relevant. The author could have used Yiftachel’s idea of dark space or ‘darkness’/‘blackness’ (a site of eviction, destruction and death) rather than using the notion of grey space (a shadow space that asserts development or security planning for all but disguises the hidden interest of the elites). Since urban actors’ actions in Dhaka are visible while making/implementing urban plans, vending on the streets, collecting protection money or evicting vendors (Mondal, 2024), there is little scope for finding a grey/shadow space.

In my reading, the argument about gendered space is also somewhat problematic. Women vendors are invisible in public spaces not for ‘a triple burden of social stigma, religious barriers, and patriarchy’ (p. 17), but for the financial/political inability to negotiate with police, mastaans, linemen and party leaders. Women vendors are not the target of police arrest; they can even work ‘without covering’ their heads (p. 165), and they can use similar tactics (to those of men) to occupy vending space. So, the triple burden plays an insignificant role. Moreover, the author claims that the book ‘makes a significant contribution to the decolonial literature’ (p. 15). However, this claim remains unexamined throughout the book and limited to literature review: reviewing decolonial literature (e.g. Chant and Pedwell, 2008; Chatterjee, 2004; Yiftachel, 2009a, 2009b) and replicating those in the Dhaka context may contribute little to the decolonial literature.

Second, two chapters are solely dedicated to the literature review, which is unusual when the book is considered exploratory. The book’s lengthy summarisation of different sets of literature (e.g. the discussion on power) limits the chance of using detailed empirical evidence supporting the main arguments. Third, the book lacks methodological notes. This might challenge readers seeking to find out how the author planned the study, engaged respondents and collected and analysed data, for instance. Lastly, the book could be clearer on its ethnographical bases, seeing that the discussion of findings mainly focuses on evidence from some interviews with the poor and key informants but is short of other common ethnographic elements or a direct exploration of this empirical approach.

Despite these limitations, Lata’s book remains a useful scholarly work. This is because it offers an interdisciplinary perspective by examining the underlying linkages between urban governance, urban informality, spatial justice, human development and gender inequality. Understanding this connection is the subject matter of some academic disciplines, including Urban Studies, Sociology, Development Studies, Geography, Gender Studies and Anthropology.

References

Chant SH, Pedwell C (2008) Women, Gender and the Informal Economy: An Assessment of ILO Research and Suggested Ways Forward. Geneva: ILO. Google Scholar

Chatterjee P (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Google Scholar

Chen M (2001) Women and informality: A global picture, the global movement. Sais Review 21(1): 71–82. Crossref; Google Scholar

Kabeer N (2008) Mainstreaming Gender in Social Protection for the Informal Economy. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Crossref; Google Scholar

Lata LN, Peter W, Sonia R (2021) The politics of gendered space: Social norms and purdah affecting female informal work in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Gender, Work & Organization 28(1): 318–336. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Lefebvre H (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Google Scholar

Mondal L (2024) The urban logic of dispossession and nomadism in neoliberal Bangladesh. International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Epub ahead of print 26 July 2024. 10.1177/00207152241261973. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

White SC (2017) Patriarchal investments: Marriage, dowry and the political economy of development in Bangladesh. Journal of Contemporary Asia 47(2): 247–272. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Yiftachel O (2009a) Critical theory and ‘gray space’: Mobilization of the colonized. City 13(2–3): 246–263. Crossref; Google Scholar

Yiftachel O (2009b) Theoretical notes on ‘gray cities’: The coming of urban apartheid? Planning Theory 8(1): 88–100. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar


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