The Politics of Poverty in Urban Slum: A Study on Kamrangirchar, Dhaka, Bangladesh

In today’s windstorm of urbanization, informal slum formations with their dynamic variations predominantly portray a common reality with dispersed contextual dimensions of urbanization within a particular space-time continuum. With the given relations of a socio-political context incorporating the notion of a group arbitrarily or voluntarily practicing power over another group, questions arise regarding the proposition of a new form of poverty in the cities in relation to the massive proliferation of these urban slums and their political settlement. This study emphasizes this cause as an underlying assumption of the impoverished condition of the urban slum dwellers while viewing poverty from the political realm. To explore this notion, this study has gone through the integration of political interventions and economic aspects within a political settlement in observing the prevalence and further reproducing cycle of poverty. In this regard, a mixed method has been conducted with an exploratory approach to collect quantitative and qualitative data sequentially through survey interview questionnaires with 100 samples through the in-depth interview (IDI) method with 16 samples, and through 3 key informant interviews (KII). Accordingly, this study reveals how the political realms create a realm of control through maneuverings that exacerbate the poverty condition and further deterioration vulnerabilities among the urban slum dwellers within a political arena with a special emphasis on Kamrangirchar, a peripheral area at Dhaka in Bangladesh.