As megacities continue to grow around the world, primarily in the Global South, they are becoming sites of ongoing and future climate and water injustices. Drawing on her research in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, Farhana Sultana examines the class and gender dimensions of hydro- and climate apartheid.
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As a geographer and an interdisciplinary scholar, when I look at climate change, I see it essentially about changes in water. Either the scarcity of it in the case of droughts, the excess of it in the case of floods, or certain levels of precipitation that can lead to flash floods, and so on. In my current research, I apply an international and interdisciplinary perspective to a case study of megacities in delta landscapes in the Global South. Through this study, I critically examine the meanings of urban water justice and urban climate justice in the context of global and local issues, as well as how we recognize various forms of climate injustice in cities.
In order to lay the foundation for what follows, it must be made clear that the hydrological cycle changes as greenhouse gas emissions rise and global temperatures change. Absurdly, the communities that contributed the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions are actually bearing the brunt of climate breakdown the most. This collides and interlinks with histories of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. Therefore, there needs to be a mutli-scalar analysis of the decision-making-processes at local, national, and international scales.
Access to urban infrastructure
This brings us to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. For many years, it has been in the news for facing various forms of climate-related challenges such as floods. In the past, Dhaka was a city of canals. Now, it is a rapidly growing megacity situated in a floodplain between the Himalayan rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra. This makes Dhaka part of the second-largest delta system in the world. Because of its tropical monsoonal climate, the city faces heavy rainfall in the summer months. With roughly 20 million people living in a very small flood-prone place, Bangladesh’s capital is confronted with the common issues of any city: there are those who have access to urban infrastructure and there are those who do not.
In the case of Dhaka, this means that about a third of its inhabitants – more than six million people – are living in spaces that are euphemistically called ‘informal housing,’ which realistically translates to living on train tracks, next to canals, or next to lakes. And because those spaces are officially not recognized by the city, there is no water and drainage infrastructure and no legal electricity connections. On the other hand, those with access to formal infrastructure and wealth may have rooftop pools, large terraces, and golf courses. These elites are also able to navigate the city with vehicles that protect them from the effects of a flood or a heatwave, whereas the urban are often traveling by foot or by bicycle.
Hence, the politics of dispossession in the city, or rather the politics of exclusion and injustice, are widening the gap of the impact of climate change among the urban population. When we consider climate apartheid in terms of who pays the price for climate change despite not having significantly contributed to it, we can apply that concept to cities. Adding to that, we also need to regard hydro-apartheid as a way to understand climate injustice, especially in the city of Dhaka.
Drowning out the urban poor
A lack of coordinated planning has historically led to waterlogging, where rainwater overloads the drainage system, posing severe problems for city residents. Due to climate change altering hydro-social cycles, we observe that the elite and middle classes can more or less safely navigate and appropriate the city during unpredictable flash floods or waterlogging, such as those that occur during the monsoon season. This dynamic ends up alienating, marginalizing, and essentially drowning out up to one-third of the city’s population: the urban poor. Additionally, rising temperatures also cause heat stress, which disproportionately affects the poor, who typically live in poorly ventilated tin huts.
With urbanization being one of the defining demographic shifts of our time, wide-ranging access to urban infrastructure becomes a key issue. When people move to cities to make a living – especially if they are not belonging to the wealthier part of the population – they often experience various forms of injustice. As a result, there are varying degrees of vulnerability, risk, and exposure to threats. Therefore, conceptualizing climate adaptation on the ground needs to engage people’s lived experiences and attitudes about what climate change and hydro apartheid mean.
Hydro-apartheid under patriarchy
In my research, the climate injustices were not only evident across class lines but intersected by gender. This was most evident with various forms of water insecurity when it comes to drinking water. The ancient poem ‘Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,’ also encapsulates the struggle of not having water to bathe and wash hands. Or, in other words, to retain human dignity. On the city scale, however, this not only becomes a matter of class, but also of gender.
In a patriarchal society, the division of household labor is often gender-based. It is often the women and the girls who have to fetch drinking water for their homes that lack water connections in informal settlements, which in poorer areas is repeatedly subject to contamination from flooding. Moreover, public water sources are sometimes inaccessible to the urban poor living in informal settlements. This results in overreliance on contaminated water and exacerbates the vulnerabilities associated with poverty. On a societal level, it can also lead to worsened experiences of waterborne diseases and public health outbreaks, which in turn exacerbate poverty.
Interconnected injustices
Thus, when analyzing climate change and its effects on an urban population, one should never assume that this dynamic is equitable across all social groups within a city. Instead, we must examine the issue through the lens of the politics of adaptation in varying urban spaces. Climate change amplifies, compounds, and creates new interlinked and interconnected injustices. With techno-managerial planning processes that exclude the voices of the urban poor, these injustices are only further exacerbated.
This vicious cycle is often only discovered at a later stage, unless you actively go looking for it and then try to address it. In the long run, the inability of marginalized people to evacuate in times of crisis, find safe and affordable housing, or receive sufficient advance warning of floods can further exacerbate urban inequity. In addition, amid the complex societal power relations and intersectionally gendered and classed access to knowledge and decision-making processes, policymakers may struggle to address urban climate injustices if they do not start soon enough.
Beyond the savior-complex and solutionism
In conclusion, with megacities growing around the world, mostly in the Global South or what is called the ‘developing world,’ they become the site of ongoing and future climate and water injustices. With more than half of the global population living in cities, it is crucial that we acknowledge the complex and challenging issues present in urban areas. These problems range from unequal access to resources and the uneven distribution of risks and vulnerabilities to the unequal consideration of voices in political planning processes. In other words, we need to do more investigative and ethical research to find the scalar connections and intersectionalities of local challenges. Climate adaptation needs to be understood as a political process in terms of differential power hierarchies.
We should not depoliticize planning processes in the urban sphere. We should not approach them with a savior-complex and the attitude to fix something for the sake of fixing it; we rather need to understand the community dynamics and what local understandings of justice are. This is because dominance has been used in problematic ways in the past during those processes. Top-down decisions often lead to the suffering of parts of the population that were not involved from the beginning. These people are often described as the ‘voiceless,’ but that is a misconception. They have a voice. They just aren’t being listened to.
Note from the editors: This text is based on a keynote address delivered by Farhana Sultana at the Kin City Festival. You can listen to the recording here.