Between resilience and risk: Women negotiating safety and access to public transport infrastructures in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with women’s equitable access to public transport in Dhaka (Bangladesh), and how their everyday experiences of navigating patriarchal urban spaces impact on their access, experiences, and negotiation of transport spaces. Transport studies and gendered mobilities research clearly demonstrate how transport and economic inequalities manifest in social exclusion for low-income women. Moreover, the prevalence of sexual harassment in public transport spaces further contributes to a climate of fear, significantly restricting women's access to education, employment, and social life. In growing recognition of these concerns, there have been attempts to design and implement safety interventions by governments and development practitioners alike. But to what extent these interventions have improved safety or accessibility for women remains ambiguous. It also raises many important questions: Is the feeling of safety fixated on materiality or malleable? Are the experiences of (un)safety in transport homogenous among women, or do class/capital and other differentials exclude some women more than others? What role do social institutions play in transport-related exclusion of women? How do women navigate this dynamic and difficult urban environment, and with what mobility outcomes? This research seeks to answer these questions by examining female commuters' relationship to public space through a holistic approach, analyzing interventions, institutions, discourses, and lived experiences. In order to achieve this goal, the research adopts a multi-methods qualitative approach. It draws on rich empirical data collected over twelve months of fieldwork carried out in two phases. This includes in-depth interviews with female bus commuters to capture lived experiences, ethnographic observations of women’s mobility on streets, in buses and all-women motorbike training clubs, go-along interviews in Dhaka Metrorail, workshops and key informant interviews with transport authorities. In addition, a comprehensive systematic review of interventions in South Asia and a discourse analysis of print media in Bangladesh sheds light on the structural issues of transport ecosystems underpinning these gendered inequities. By including inter-disciplinary conceptual perspectives such as risk, respectability, agency, biopolitics and assemblages, the thesis offers insights into the conceptualization of safety from a feminist-affective lens, emphasizing women’s rights to the city. This multifaceted approach to understanding the myriad ways in which transport systems interact with societal structures and are experienced by individuals is rather underexplored in the transport literature emanating from low and middle-income countries of Global South, and particularly with respect to Bangladesh. This study thus contributes to the emerging scholarship on women's right to public spaces in Bangladesh and other South Asian contexts, with a critical account of the systemic layers of social complexity, institutional and structural transport policies linked to trajectories of rapid urbanization.