The urban logic of dispossession and nomadism in neoliberal Bangladesh

Abstract

Through quantitative and qualitative evidence collected in 2017–2018 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this article investigates the detrimental impact of coercive evictions on urban nomads. It conceptualizes urban nomads as an ever-growing army of dispossessed who are forced to frequently move from one place to another within a city for shelter and work. They have few belongings and little social support and are culturally and politically marginalized. Forced evictions dispossess them in co-constitutive economic, social, cultural, and political ways, which relate to Pierre Bourdieu’s four types of capital. The article argues that coercive evictions produce and reproduce a nomadic urban community that experiences various kinds of dispossession after losing control over different forms of capital.