Tanzil Shafique is a lecturer of urban design at University of Sheffield School of Architecture. The Universtiy of Sheffield is working with River and Delta Research Centre leading the REDAA-funded project ‘Climate impacted dwellers-led agroecological stewardship for restoring wetlands (Re-WET)’ in Bangladesh.
Can you briefly explain the challenge you are addressing?
People are moving out of the city centre because there is not enough affordable housing. The urban wetlands in a city like Dhaka are not suitable for formal buildings but people will use the edges of the wetlands to create informal settlements – they self-organise to do this. They reclaim the wetlands using rubbish and debris and build a home.
These are internally displaced people mainly. The settlement we are working in is the largest in Bangladesh – 300,000 people packed into an areas the size of two Buckingham Palaces [a royal residence in London]. They are environmental migrants really because of losing their livelihoods in rural areas.
They might be from the southern part of Bangladesh where there is a problem of salinity, or affected by flash floods in northern parts of the country which have decimated homesteads on the river bank. The frequency of these events is increasing with climate change.
They come to the city and live in peripheral settlements – then move right to the middle – to premium areas and then move again from one settlement to another.
Very few would be moving from formal housing and into this slum through choice – it’s because of a lack of affordable housing.
How are they viewed by others for doing this?
There is a negative narrative about them in the city even though they do all the service jobs – they are maids and chauffeurs, for example. They are vilified in the media.
There is pollution coming from both the informal and formal side of things into the lake – there are sewage pipes going into the lake, for instance. But it is the informal dwellers who are criminalised; it forms a justification for their eviction.
We are trying to debunk this myth – that creating a livelihood and looking after the environment go against each other - that informal settlements are detrimental to the environment and nature. Many of these informal settlers were involved in agriculture before and have knowledge of nurturing nature. We realised they could contribute something and be environmental stewards – hence designing our project.
Has what you are proposing to do ever been done before? Where did you get the idea for doing this?
I started working on this when I was an undergrad in 2007 so have been engaged for 17 years with the community. But the REDAA grant is enabling us to test a new approach. We have worked with the Nogor Abad [urban agriculture] collective of slumdwellers who, despite the conditions in the slum, have worked for the last six or seven years on fostering food security.
These people have become the stewards of their environment and everything has fallen into place with this funding.
As stewards, will they be paid?
That’s a central question. Nogor Abad is not formally registered so only informally part of the consortium [funded by REDAA] They will act as intermediaries . We want to develop an ecocredit mechanism – to create whole families of stewards.
Steward families will be subsidised - given seed funding. One of our researchers is a specialist in climate finance and developing micro-finance tools. So they will work out the best way to do this. We want to incentivise people, institute a new process and create a functioning system.
But we also want to find out how we can sustain this when the project ends. We have 11,000 hectares of wetlands in Dhaka. If we can establish a model for 5,000 hectares we can scale it up to engage with the 5 million informal settlement dwellers in Dhaka – equivalent to the population of New Zealand- to make a massive difference to the environment.
Nothing like this exists at all – it’s revolutionary – these people have always been seen as a problem rather than being a massive resource and agents of change.
Building this positive narrative is central to what we want to do.
We want to establish a model that contributes to seeing projections of a downward trend in pollution. Then we can extrapolate across and scale that up and see the impact intensifying.
Out of interest, does the media recognise the importance of the wetlands for biodiversity and the implications of losing the wetlands? How is it being reported?
Our local implementation partner – RDRC – has been acting as an activist for 10 years so there has been lots of media attention on rivers, lake systems, canals as well as the wetlands. There are regular reports that wetlands are shrinking – it’s well known. But it’s the real estate groups who are strong; they say ‘we need to fill wetlands with building stock to develop the country’.
It’s the usual capital vs nature argument.
Is that tension being acknowledged in the media?
Not as much as it should be. The power dynamic is not acknowledged in the media but that could have been because of the political situation – it has been difficult to criticise political leaders in the last ten years. We’re in a much better place now so things could change. We’ve got an interim government and it will be easier to implement the project.
There are lots of stakeholders – the wetlands are right in the middle of the city, wedged between the most expensive areas. It’s government land but the ownership is disputed – there is a 20-year ongoing court case and formal injunction and that’s why there’s been no formal building work, so the informal settlement developed.
When we met in Nairobi [at the REDAA in person meeting], I realised that most of the projects are not talking about urban contexts. For us it is a dichotomy: what is the role of nature in a city? I’m interested in breaking down these barriers – to realise that nature restoration is relevant to cities too.
We are working with rich and powerful stakeholders – if we can do it here, it can be done anywhere.
How are you working with the local government?
We’ve got a set of formal events from February 2025 nationwide – to talk about the work but since the fall of the previous government we have been meeting stakeholders – the chief town planner of Dhaka City, for example. We brought him to the site to show him the informal settlement – it was the first time he had ever visited. Local farmers gave him a tour and explained what they wanted to do. We have a commitment from the central city planning authority to build a walkway across the wetland.
We have met the waste management officers, the local municipality and two ministers in charge of local government. The project threads through several ministries – but at the moment many ministries are siloed – we are breaking down barriers in local government space too.
Can you tell me what you mean by ‘green entrepreneurship’?
The way we want to develop the stewardship model is for people to be seen as nature-based entrepreneurs – we don’t want to relegate the role to something like street cleaners. This is urban agriculture – about livelihoods – if the government can subsidise rural farmers then urban agriculture can be subsidised too. There’s no model for this yet, so we hope this project will develop that – a hybridised model – supported by government but not entirely.
It seems like you’ve got a clear vision but what do you anticipate some of the challenges might be?
There could be political instability potentially with upcoming elections. One party political state might be repeated.
Secondly, there are different machinations to get the land from the informal settlers. We don’t anticipate problems with this interim government but a new government may view things differently – we may have to include stewards from further away – the relationship with the community must be maintained.
To mitigate those challenges, we’ve already established links with opposition parties in case they get elected. And we’ve been working on court cases with settlement dwellers to challenge forced eviction.
Related read: City of Desire – an urban biography of the largest informal settlement in Bangladesh. Tanzil Shafique. Bloomsbury