City of Desire

<b>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.</b><br/><b><br/></b>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.<br/><br/>Through a detailed case study of Karail the largest informal settlement in Bangladesh Shafique offers ground-breaking insights into the <i>production</i>of 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.<br/> <br/> 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.<br/><br/><i>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</i>.