Re-thinking housing through assemblages: Lessons from a Deleuzean visit to an informal settlement in Dhaka

Abstract

A spectre haunts how we think about housing—describing it in binaries, in oppositions, in ‘essentialised’ identities (formal/informal, north/south, social/spatial, product/process). What does a more nuanced understanding of assemblages—drawn from the original work of Deleuze and Guattari—have to offer housing studies to move beyond such dichotomies? This paper outlines a conceptual framework where housing is re-thought as an unfolding of socio-material processual-relations and desires forming a field of intensities. This theoretical framework is used to think through empirical findings from a six-month socio-spatial ethnography conducted in Karail, the largest informal settlement in Dhaka that houses 300,000 people. The findings, seen through assemblages, allow identifying, firstly, the interconnections between different actors across different binaries that make it work and secondly, the different modes of settlement’s production itself. Lastly, the paper recasts the settlement as a manifestation of a landscape of intersecting desires in an effort to speak of housing in a new language transcending the stifling dichotomy of top-down/bottom-up.