Inhabiting Transition:
Labor and Migration in Dhaka
For many rural-urban migrants, construction sites are recurring places of arrival to the city. Within rising towers, workers cook, gather, and sleep in the architecture they are building, embodying the environmental shifts, informality, and precarity that shape Dhaka’s development.
Indeed, Dhaka’s dramatic urbanization is shaped by the movement of people. This movement reflects larger environmental transitions across Bangladesh’s shifting, deltaic landscape, fueling growth in a megacity of over thirty-six million inhabitants.
While prevalent in practice, the inhabited construction site rarely appears in architectural narratives of the city. Examining the experiences of migrant laborers offers an expanded historiography of the built environment, honoring labor contributions and layering how migration is materialized and embodied in architecture.
Through spatio-temporal analysis, photo documentation, and oral history interviews, this ongoing project examines the temporarily inhabited site as a site of migration, holding the rural loss, resilience, and contributions of those who build the city.
