How can a peninsula made of garbage and building rubble be serviced by water and electricity without any planning intervention? How do migrants from the countryside develop their parallel universe in one of the world’s poorest cities? And how far does self-subsistence reach? To find the answers to these questions, Elisa Bertuzzo rented a room for two months in Karail Bosti, Dhaka’s biggest slum.

One has to change the location, at best several times, to write of Karail Bosti; one has to leave one’s acquainted desk, forego one’s natural, personal rhythms. Being far from Karail Bosti, far from the daily experience of walking on the katcha rasta – those unpaved tracks that are leaving ever deeper marks in the landscape from year to year –, writing about “living in the slum” becomes difficult, contrived, and artificial.

Bosti means settlement, but in specialist debate as well as in everyday perception, places such as Karail are considered as “slums” and are associated with poverty, degraded environment, and precarious housing and living conditions. Among Dhaka’s settlements of the poor, Karail is rather an established one; the first settlers came 30 years ago, their children have grown up in the meantime and live their life and do their work here. In recent times, that means after some other big Bosti have been cleared, Karail also stands out by its extension. The peninsula in Banani Lake that is formed of building debris and uncountable layers of garbage measures roughly 160,000 square metres; it is estimated that roughly 120,000 people are living there.

If one is far from Karail Bosti, and the sentence one is going to write is neither interrupted by the children of friends nor a power blackout, one has to produce some interruptions at one’s own. Go out in the cold of the Berlin winter; to feel the inconvenience of being without a reliable home, to feel the fear of loss, the fear of losing one’s train of thought – or the small, makeshift corrugated-iron shack room in which one has stacked one’s clothes and some utensils. Drawing my shawl over my shoulder – with the same gesture women and men draw their big, square shaal over their clothes –thanks to the body’s memory I once again plunge into Karail Bosti.

There is for example the women’s waiting for the sound of the “water boys” in the morning. When they stand up at 6 o’clock to prepare breakfast for husband and children the water in the plastic cans is as a rule nearly used up. So there is almost nothing to drink when eating the hot masala consisting of potatoes and other vegetables. The men will later order a glass of tea at one of the roadside shacks. Especially in the hot summer months, there is not even any water left for washing up the plates and cooking utensils that are left on the ground, at the hut’s threshold.

The daily routines of the housewives in Karail Bosti are closely connected with the availability or lack of water – from doing the washing up to watering the vegetable and spice plants to taking a shower or washing the smaller children. For this reason the time before the water is supplied – especially when some delays occur – is marked as well by impatience and by a welcome, rare idleness. Neighbours use this time to visit each other or to chat in the small free space between their respective huts: The women talk about their children, about events of birth and death, about growing food prices, and about their relatives in the villages. Often they remain silent. Those women share the same infrastructure: Apart from cooking areas and wet rooms, this does also include the common water supply system, for which nevertheless the families have to pay individually.

In the end, the water boys arrive. They connect a garden hose that is lying about and used as the common “water conduit” to another hose that seems to come from very far away. The water is running. Women and girls fill their daily water ration in their cans. This is done in a strict routine and takes 15 minutes at the most. To more water, the people have no right; and more water cans would not fit into their small houses. After the water has been brought in, it is time for the domestic work. At first, the water is boiled so that it can be drunk safely.

Since the building of wells is expensive – the existing ones have been sponsored by aid agencies and only in very rare cases have been procured by resident groups – and since it is not always possible to find “good” springs in the ground, most inhabitants of Karail have to use the described system. The water boys are no municipal workers though; and also not workers in a self-governing project for infrastructural upgrading. As it is, these boys are working for so-called mastan – people of influence who make money from the emergency situation in this settlement to which, since it has been declared illegal, no municipal services are delivered. The water is tapped in houses somewhere in the surroundings that are supplied by public water. The owners or managers of those houses sell this water to Karail’s inhabitants at an inflated price that is not regulated in any way.

Similar to the water, electricity is also conducted from neighbouring houses to Karail. This is effected by a vast network of power cables. Every hut has by now been equipped with a light bulb, most huts are also equipped with a ceiling fan for the hot summer and stifling monsoon months; and some people even own television sets. Electricity is vital to the many businesses – grocery shops, video arcades, tailor shops, recycling and ironworking shops, tea shops and makeshift video shops – as well as to the central market, which has recently been roofed over, where vegetable, fish, and meat are sold. But the power supply is not reliable. Because of the high demand from the industry and services sectors – a demand far exceeding the municipal supply capacities – power blackouts are common in Dhaka’s residential areas; in the Bosti, these interruptions occur most frequently and last longest. Their inhabitants, who earn 3000 to 5000 Taka a month (30 to 50 Euros), pay roughly 1000 Taka for the basic water and electricity provision – compared to the service delivered, they pay up to ten times more than the inhabitants of houses with a regular supply.

Bundles of pipes on the ground along the streets, wiring harnesses over the corrugated-iron roofs – In Karail Bosti, the image of web or network materialises in diverse ways. The population have, for example, jointly established piers for small boats that have partly been made flood-proof in order to have a better connection from their peninsula to the highway in the south and to the residential and business area in the east. For those thousands who leave the Bosti in the morning to go to school, to visit Dhaka’s vegetable markets, to fulfil their poorly-paid work in the houses of the middle class, in universities, in offices, or in the industrial plants in the east of the city, returning late in the evening or in the night, these piers mark the beginning and the ending of their days. Makeshift sewers are jointly constructed and maintained by greater neighbourhoods, toilets and wet rooms by adjacent families.

In Karail, a myriad of “saving groups” and shomiti, “committees” are active too. The saving groups have arisen in response to the problems of many urban migrants who cannot open accounts because they are without means and legal address. If all put together their savings, a sufficient sum comes together. Furthermore, there is always someone in the group who has a legal address in a village or at relatives in Dhaka. A peculiarity of Karail’s saving groups is that all members must come from the same region. This provision ensures that no member steals money from the joint account: As Bangladesh’s society is based on village communities, local networks, and social control, anyone who would try to run away with the money would quickly be found. The committees, on the other hand, are engaged in diverse tasks, from developing and extending local markets to organising cultural events and fundraising for the many mosques up to the maintenance and repair of streets in the aftermath of the monsoon or especially strong storms that are often followed by short-term flooding.

In the course of the years, Karail Bosti has developed against the background of a twofold “insulation”. There is on the one hand the geographical, spatial insulation as the lake forms a natural boundary to the south and to the east, and the contact points between the settlement and the urban fabric to the north and to the west are scarce. Although this does not hamper the people’s mobility, it has contributed to a strong dissociation of the settlement from its surroundings. This dissociation is partly due to the building stock that forms a strong contrast to the (post)modern concrete-and-glass construction of the neighbouring districts and partly to the fact that in the settlement own rhythms, rules, and structures have evolved. Those who pass the Bosti on one of the two highways from the North and the West feel confronted with an invisible border: On the one side is heterogeneous, fragmented Dhaka, on the other the also seemingly chaotic, yet highly organised universe of Karail.

The other dissociation is due to the fact that the Bosti has been left alone by planning and administration: Neither have the repeated eviction attempts proven successful, nor have measures for an at least minimum development been taken. In this respect, Karail is a typical example: According to data collected by UN Habitat in 2009, roughly 60 percent of Dhaka’s inner-city settlements of the poor lack drainage channels and drainage systems, although the flood risk is greater than elsewhere because of their location near the water or on low-lying ground (see p. 36); only 40 percent of these settlements are equipped with wells. 60 percent of the urban poor have only provisional toilets at their disposal that are shared by several families, as the Dhaka-located Centre for Urban Studies found out in 2005. All others have to get along without any facilities.

In the view of these facts, all initiatives at establishing at least basic provisions in Karail might be seen as positive measures by an active and constructive community. Yet the financial means are insufficient to provide for more than stopgap solutions: The drainage channels are open and follow the houses on street level. Sanitary problems as well as air and water pollution are the inevitable consequences. In Banani Lake, into which the sewage and most of the garbage of the settlement is directly conducted, the fish have become extinct. Furthermore, for some years the number of people suffering from epidemic diseases, especially typhoid and dengue fever has increased – and not only among the people living in the Bosti.

On the spot, one understands that there is more than only the shortcomings of an improvised infrastructure system. The continued existence of hierarchical structures is also to be felt; and this is possibly the biggest obstacle with regard to processes of emancipation – the seldom addressed reverse side of the informality so much admired in the West. Surely all people here are living in precarious conditions, in an ecologically and sanitarily impaired, illegally developed district of Dhaka that is characterised by improvised structures, insufficient infrastructure, frequently occurring building accidents, fires, and minor and more severe cases of flooding. And all inhabitants have stories to tell on the difficulties of migrating from the home village to the unknown big city, stories of failed dreams, of poverty, loss of land, and of flooding disasters.

And yet it would be quite false to assume equality amongst slum dwellers. In Karail, from the outset local strongmen, invoking a “right of first arrival”, have demanded a “land use fee” for building shacks, although the land on which Karail is built belongs for the most part to the state. But notions of land law mean little here. In consequence of this fact, many people speak of their land when referring to the plot on which their house or shop has been erected. They do not react to the objection that the land is owned by the state and that no one else is entitled to own, buy, or sell it. Instead, I am informed on the rules of a brutally cold trade market: In sensible times, for instance, land could be bought at low prices from those who fear to be expelled; when the crisis has gone the land could be sold on with profits. Good deals had been made for instance when the local telephone company shortly after its privatisation had wanted to set an example by effecting evictions in the company-owned part of the Bosti. It becomes clear that in such a system the weakest will always lose – those who have no backing and no talent to be good brokers.

While this kind of “real estate speculation” goes unnoticed by outsiders, another kind of “property investment” acts as spatial organiser. In former times, all newcomers built their huts on the side of an inner courtyard equipped with communal sanitary facilities and cooking areas. These huts could be expanded little by little. The resulting huts cluster had a structure similar to typical Bengal farmsteads in which households related to one another lived as joint families. Karail’s first settlers say that they organised their huts in this way in order to provide room for their rapidly growing extended families or for other relatives form the countryside. Today, on the contrary, individuals bring subterritories under their control and erect elongated corrugated-iron shacks on the land. Every shack contains 4 to 7 single rooms measuring 6 to 9 square metres; these rooms are then rented out for 1500 to 2000 Taka per month (roughly 15 to 20 Euros) to families consisting of up to 7 persons.

In the last 5 to 10 years, these elongated shacks have changed the urban fabric and the spatial experience of Karail. Who succeeds in passing the watchmen and caretakers of the as yet uninhabited luxury apartments in the neighbouring residential towers and looks down on Karail will inevitably be reminded of army barracks strung together geometrically. In their daily lives, the inhabitants rather notice the strangeness of the new streetscape – The small streets are fronted by corrugated-iron walls which are for the most part windowless and contrast painfully to the busy, and safe, shopping streets of the settlement. This tendency is also due to the highly increased population density in Karail that calls for efficient space utilisation. In 2010, the first two-storey buildings have been erected; for some time even professional carpenters have been hired who are building rows of houses or even houses with arcades set on stilts that are extending Karail over the water. This development does also reflect the unequal power relations between poorer and powerless on the one hand and richer and mightier dwellers on the other hand who can capture communal space, demolish existing huts or rob them their privilege of water access by building rows of houses on stilts at their doorsteps.

Karail’s “professionalised” basic water and electricity provision system, the land speculation among the squatters, and the housing marked oriented on mass production are examples for strategies that are neither improvised nor unconscious. On the contrary; they are as clear and as universally accepted that they need not be explained to the dwellers. Traditional, non-urban norms such as submission and dependency on protectors are dominating and leave hardly any room for self-organisation, let alone emancipation. While the inflated price for the basic water and electricity supply prevents the amelioration of the living conditions of economically weak households concerns such as garbage collection, street lighting, paving or sewerage, that are beyond the scope of the private water and electricity supply, cannot be tackled.