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The book analyses the key livelihood and governance challenges that the urban poor experience while navigating public spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

Dr Lutfun Nahar Lata will deliver a talk based on her book Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh: The Production of Counterspace (Routledge, 2023). Dr Lata’s book analyses the key livelihood and governance challenges that the urban poor experience while navigating public spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

Using data collected through extensive fieldwork in Bangladesh, the book contributes to the emerging scholarship of resilient cities, gendered space, spatial justice, and poverty in cities of the Global South. The book assesses the everyday politics of survival for the urban poor; how the poor negotiate different levels of formal and informal modes of power and governance; and the dynamics of gender. 

It explores how tenuous counter-spaces are created when these factors combine to provide a valuable framework for work in other urban contexts in the Global South beyond Bangladesh. Using cross-disciplinary perspectives, this book investigates the issues of human development, urban governance, urban planning and the gendered nature of urban space to outline how these issues enable or constrain poor people’s livelihood practices and their rights to be in the city. 

Exploring debates surrounding placemaking and inclusive cities and their connection to poor people’s livelihoods, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Sociology, Development Studies, Planning, Geography and Anthropology. 

About the speaker

Dr Lutfun Nahar Lata is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy and the Director - International in the School of Social and Political Sciences in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Lutfun's primary research area focuses on the Sociology of work and employment including the gig economy and the future of work. 

She has written about gig economy, urban marginality, migration, poverty governance, housing and place-based disadvantage. She is a mixed-methods researcher with extensive experience in conducting and publishing qualitative, quantitative and digital research and working with multidisciplinary teams that include stakeholders from academia, industry and local and central governments. 

Lutfun is the author of Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh (Routledge 2023). Her research has been published in a number of high-ranking international journals such as Current Sociology, The Sociological Review, Sociology Compass, Gender, Work & Organization, Cities, Geographical Research, Housing Policy Debate, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Government Information Quarterly.

Image Credit: Ahnaf Tahsin via unsplash