Urban Poor's Accessibility to Decent Shelter in Dhaka City

Abstract

�����������������������������������Dhaka is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It is a city of tenants, a third of which are poor and harshly suffering from housing ills. This study quests for decent shelter for city's poor tenants. Residential land in Dhaka is extremely expensive and short in supply. The proposition of 'Tenement Apartment (TA)' as affordable decent shelter for the poor tenants is assessed in this exploratory study based on 'affordability, cost recovery and replicability' concepts. The study further assessed conventional construction customs and financing mechanisms of informal providers and finds their potential to implement the proposition. Affordability, Cost Recovery, Informal Provider, Replicability, Tenement Apartment ��������������������������������� Keywords: INTRODUCTIONDhaka (Bangladesh) is now the tenth largest urban agglomeration in the world with second fastest rate of population growth and has become one of the mega cities of the world (UN, 2004). Present population size of the city is over 12.6 million and about 35 percent of the city dwellers live in informal settlements and are classified as urban poor. Poor quality of housing and lack of tenure security is the direct indicator of these informal settlements where there have no basic urban amenities. The poors are the direct sufferers due to the housing ills and their thirst for decent shelter is somehow overlooked over time.In Dhaka, residential land for housing is limited due to topographic constraints and extremely expensive. With limited buildable land, high density housing is one of the viable solutions in providing affordable shelter. Tenement houses typically configure with small dwelling units. Usually there are rows of dwelling units where the families occupy limited individual space and share common facilities and services. The concept of tenement houses presents a potential solution to the housing crisis in cities of developing countries and ensures a high-density living at an affordable cost. This study addresses the aptness of TAs to the impoverished city dwellers based on affordability *1 , cost recovery *2 and replicability *3 concepts. To make housing accessible to vast urban poor population, the apportioned cost must be affordable to them without subsidy. As the housing providers possess limited resources, housing programs can only be sustained if aimed at full cost recovery from the beneficiaries.Policies to supply shelter for the urban poor are not adequately addressed and seem to be ill suited to the realities of Dhaka city where nearly all housing is produced by private informal efforts. The conventional informal provider's shelter supply policy is very different from the formal housing providers who often provide shelter for the poor and neglected sector in the housing market. This study attempts to explore the informal providers' latent shelter supply policy and to utilize their energy to meet the growing need for affordable decent shelter by the poor. TAs are still absent in the city's...