Ashraful AlamUniversity of Otago · School of Geography
Ashraful Alam
PhD Geography & Planning
About
31
Publications
10,340
Reads
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263
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am interested in politics of housing, home & homelessness and minority ethnic migration in regional and small town areas.
Additional affiliations
February 2023 - present
University of Otago
Position
- Senior Lectuer
Description
- Senior Lecturer in Planning and Urbanism and Coordinator of Master of Planning Programme
November 2018 - January 2023
May 2018 - November 2018
Education
August 2013 - April 2018
September 2009 - August 2011
September 1997 - August 2002
Publications
Publications (31)
More-than-human relations have gained much attention in the study of home and homemaking in Western contexts. We contribute to and geographically expand this growing literature by focusing on informal homes established by climate migrants living in the urban fringes of Khulna city, Bangladesh. To explore these precarious dwellings we develop a more...
The paper contributes to the growing research on relational thinking about housing and home by exploring the informal homes of rural migrants in Khulna city, Bangladesh. The concept of ‘unbounding’ is used to trace the fluidity and connections established between migrant homes and neighbourhood socio-ecologies. Walking interviews exploring women’s...
We defend a particular view of care as alternate infrastructure. Drawing insights from feminist care ethics we rethink the dynamics between care and infrastructure to trace out more inclusive infrastructural conditions in cities. We use feminist ethics of "caring with" and the relational reading of infrastructure as "a specific form of life" to ana...
In Australian suburbs, due to increasing housing unaffordability, informal shared housing makes up a growing private rental sub-market. At present, there is limited research exploring what dynamics may motivate owner-occupiers to initiate informal shared housing, how informality operates in this rental sub-market and how owner-occupiers with distin...
Rural and small town New Zealand is undergoing significant demographic and economic transitions. Steady out-migration, economic change and population aging since the 1980s/ 1990s catalysed the 'zombie town' discourse. This parallels the rise of rural multiculturalism as a new multi-ethnic demographic makeup is distinctly visible due to diversificat...
Some claim the pandemic has ushered in a “post-work” era when the concepts of work, workplace, and commuting are being remade. Digital technologies, artificial intelligence, co-creation and multi-locational work sites are creating new spaces for work and encouraging the merging of work and non-work spaces like never before. These changes are also h...
Relational vulnerability embraces place-specific social relations as critical determinants of vulnerability , countering the traditional conceptualization of vulnerability as scale neutral and a static feature of an individual or a social group. This paper adopts a relational approach to examine how vulnerabilities are experienced by two groups of...
How can diverse collectives come together to design, plan and imagine cities differently? What would cities look like if they are planned by and with plural inhabitants to be more broadly inclusive of human and nonhuman lives lived in difference and in common? What would cities look like if they respected Indigenous sovereignty and belonging? What...
This article adopts a place-based approach to explore tiger atmospheres in the Sundarbans, a trans-boundary environmental commons and major climatic hotspot in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta of India and Bangladesh. We argue that affective intensities of greed (lobh), fear (bhaya), respect (srodhya), trust (biswas) and empathy (karuna) sensed...
There is a resurgent interest in the study of 'urban commons' in critical geography scholarship as a way to reimagine cities beyond the pervasive neoliberal framing. Inspired by this body of work, this paper explores the processes through which marginalised groups, despite their many socioeconomic limitations, negotiate and transform their sparse u...
In this chapter, the authors explore what more-than-human approaches can contribute to development research, teaching and practice. The authors believe that this work is timely as development studies and practice have yet to engage with more-than-human insights in any significant way. They first develop the concept of more-than-human development be...
This paper explores the role of local government Facebook pages in citizen engagement by focusing on two councils in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Dunedin City Council (DCC) and the Otago Regional Council (ORC). We investigate how these councils use their Facebook pages to communicate government matters with citizens, and how citizens engage with the c...
This special issue of the New Zealand Geographer was
conceptualised as a way to celebrate the academic and
research contributions made by Otago Geographers over
the last 75 years, as represented by the work they have
published in the national flagship Geography journal.
The 11 papers in this collection are a small but representative
cameo of the ma...
Special Issue (Urban Policy and Research): Cities after COVID-19: Reconsidering urban form, mobility, housing and planning in Australasia
To contribute to the new post-COVID-19 urban agenda, this special issue welcomes conventional research papers that draw on empirical data to discuss what we have experienced in our cities since the pandemic outb...
This article presents findings from research undertaken to explore how local authorities and small coastal communities can successfully and sustainably adapt to accelerating sea level rise (SLR) associated with climate change.
This critical commentary re!ects on a rapidly mobilised international podcast project, in which 25 urban scholars from around the world provided audio recordings about their cities during COVID-19. New digital tools are increasing the speeds, formats and breadth of the research and communication mediums available to researchers. Voice recorders on...
In Australian suburbs in the face of increasing housing unaffordability, owner-occupied shared houses make up a growing private rental submarket. Researchers have sought to analyse the growth and implications of shared housing on tenants, community wellbeing and urban planning system. There is limited research exploring the dynamics that motivate o...
The paper conceptualises the process of voluntary relocation undertaken by rural farmers to informal settlements in coastal cities. These are journeys that occur without formal institutional support, utilising migrants' own agency. Learning from these community-driven relocations has merit in rethinking climate change adaptation at the regional lev...
In a warming world, urban environmental stresses are exacerbated by population-increase-induced development of grey infrastructure that usually leaves minimal scope for blue (and green) elements and processes, potentially resulting in mismanagement of stormwater and flooding issues. This paper explores how urban growth planning in the megacity of D...
My thesis adopts more-than-human geographical insights to consider how non- human agencies actively shape homes and home-making practices. It explores seventeen rural migrant homes that are informally negotiated in vacant lots in the urban fringes of Khulna city in Bangladesh. These homes are outside the slum stereotypes usually discussed in the de...
There is growing interest in 'more-than-human' influences on places and practices. However, while the theoretical thinking in this field is well developed, methodology and methods lag behind. Borrowing insights from feminist geographers' articulation of 'response', we explore how participatory photography can be used to examine more-than-human proc...
Given the year on year decrease of rural farmland and various forms of land degradation through the intrusion of non-farm land uses, the government of Bangladesh has drafted the agrarian reform strategies, primarily to protect the agricultural land from encroachment, conversion, and indiscriminate use. The draft Agricultural Land Protection and Lan...
The southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh has faced thirty large-and moderate-scale natural disasters since the last two decades. Aila, the extreme disaster event, has unveiled major shortfall in the approach of conventional disaster preparedness. Gap between planned intervention and the way coastal inhabitants respond to climatic exposures has...
The paper analyzes the homeownership policy contexts of Singapore and Hong Kong through literature review and examines if the policy elements behind Singaporean success in implementing homeownership are transferable to the present socio-economic and political context of Hong Kong. The theoretical construct of "policy transfer" seeks to understand c...
Economy and land constraint led development strategy of Hong Kong always pushed social focus to the least priority corner. Recently problems are arising in forms of loss of heritage, collective memories, local characteristics, business and local people through gentrification. Local planning strategies and their urban renewal projects in Hong Kong a...
![Figure 1: Tripartite Framework of Sustainability [88]](profile/Momtaj-Khalil/publication/336232838/figure/fig1/AS:809878318768129@1570101446442/Tripartite-Framework-of-Sustainability-88_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 2: Planner's Triangle [89]](profile/Momtaj-Khalil/publication/336232838/figure/fig2/AS:809878318743552@1570101446510/Planners-Triangle-89_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 3: Sustainability Axis by Connelly [90]](profile/Momtaj-Khalil/publication/336232838/figure/fig3/AS:809878318751746@1570101446586/Sustainability-Axis-by-Connelly-90_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 4: Sustainability Axis of Hong Kong [Author]](profile/Momtaj-Khalil/publication/336232838/figure/fig4/AS:809878318772238@1570101446661/Sustainability-Axis-of-Hong-Kong-Author_Q320.jpg)
Since the inception of Sustainable Development Concept in the 1990s, it has travelled a long path and are exercised in countries with different aspirations set out through differences of needs. Within the broad framework of the economy, environment and social equity, the concept has undergone the unique way of borrowing than creating '[1] process o...
Buildings in urban centres create close dialogues with people. Public buildings integrate the mobility of urban life as if they can hold people’s joy, grief, and so many experiences in themselves. Proper spatial order (conditional and unconditional sharing, the thresholds) is inevitable. Public buildings will be by nature permeable, easily accessib...
Questions
Question (1)
Hello, we plan to do a content analysis of Facebook posts that have appeared on a Local Facebook page over a year. We are also keen to explore the level of communication build-up through public reaction/comments to the posts. We are wondering if there is any smart tool available for capturing the content. Or, should we need to download the posts manually? - The later one sounds a pretty laborious job! Any suggestion on the tool, relevant published materials is much appreciated. Kind regards, AA
Projects
Projects (10)
How can we reimagine, view and design cities differently
- through multi-species and more-than-human collaborations?
- through nurturing care/care-full assemblages?
- and resist urban exceptionalism?
This study seeks to examine how ethnically diverse migrants settle in rural and small-town New Zealand, what benefits they bring, and what challenges emerge through their engagement with the existing host communities. The focus is on the under-researched minority ethnic communities who are statistically defined as “Pasifika, Asian, Middle Eastern/Latin American/African and Other”. Our research seeks to examine how different intersectional pressures, such as religion, gender, skills, economic status, and country of origin, govern the interactions of these minority ethnic communities with host communities and settlement experiences.
The central research questions of the project are:
1) How, and why, do minority ethnic migrants make the decision to stay in rural and small-town settlements?
2) What is the role of broader networks of government and non-government agencies in encouraging their settlement process?
Muslim immigration to New Zealand began in the 1970s through the arrival of Fijian Indians. Following the changes of Immigration policies in 1987 and increasingly in recent years, New Zealand's urban centres have seen a surge of Muslim immigrants from Asian, African and East European counties. There has been growing interest in researching Muslim immigrant households' experiences, especially those of refugee background. However, very little is known how the experiences vary among male and female members in the same households. With an intersectional focus on Muslim immigrant women and their politics of representation, this research sets to examine Muslim immigrant families' experiences of access to everyday services (e.g., public transport, health care, education, sports and recreation, etc.) in New Zealand cities.
