City liveability rankings tell a biased story – our research in Dhaka explains why

By Shreyashi Dasgupta, University of Liverpool, Annemiek Prins, Radboud University

Like many fast-growing megacities in Asia and Africa, Dhaka, in Bangladesh, is often stigmatised as one of the most unliveable cities on earth, due to overcrowding, slums and substandard housing. The Bangladeshi capital boasts around 23 million residents.

In the 2023 edition of its annual global liveability index, the Economist Intelligence Unit (the research and analysis division of the Economist Group) ranked the Bangladeshi capital 166 out of 173 cities. As Helemul Alam of the Daily Star put it, that ranking makes it the “seventh least liveable city in the world”. While such lists tell a compelling story, it is an inherently biased one.

The Economist’s global liveability index is based on the experiences of expats rather than citizens. This kind of ranking inevitably privileges the perspectives of certain urban occupants and workers over others, often overlooking communities in urban peripheries.

We have shown that people move back and forth between urban and rural places. They shift between jobs, localities and accommodations.

Translocal lives

Our research was based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork that we both conducted between 2015 and 2018. We were examining two kinds of spaces linked to seasonal and labour migration: rickshaw garages and mess dormitories. These are typically located on the margins of the city in neighbourhoods such as Mirpur, Rayerbazar, Kamrangirchar, Shonir Akhra and Badda. We interviewed more than 100 people passing through these spaces in search for work and income, from rickshaw drivers, construction workers and garment workers to small-scale entrepreneurs.

We found that both mess dormitories and rickshaw garages are brimming with movement and business. They accommodate varying numbers of workers throughout the year, depending on the seasons. They blur functions of sleeping, working and entrepreneurship.

In a 2019 paper for the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, Khandoker Abdus Salam and Rezaul Karim estimated that there are 1.1 million cycle-rickshaws operating on the streets of Dhaka, accommodated in garages across the city.

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