TITLE:
Infrastructural Development and Vulnerabilities: A Sociological Study of Two Selected Flyovers in Dhaka City, Bangladesh
AUTHORS:
Shamsul Arefin, Tamanna Rashid, Didarul Habib
KEYWORDS:
Infrastructural Development, Underdevelopment, Flyovers, Vulnerability
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.7 No.7,
July
11,
2019
ABSTRACT: Does infrastructural
development cause underdevelopment of the third world peripheral states like
Bangladesh? Can flyover project overcome traffic congestion? Does it create
vulnerabilities for the common people? This paper is an attempt to answer all
the above questions. Depending on the qualitative research design, this study
was conducted on the two selected flyover projects in Dhaka, Bangladesh named
Mayor Hanif Flyover and Khilgaon Flyover. Theoretical arguments of development
and underdevelopment on modernization and dependency school were incorporated
for critically examining this research. Hence, the researcher followed conflict
approaches given by Dahrendorf (1959), later used Coser (1956) and Guangshe
Jia, et al.’s (2011) arguments to understand how mega projects
like flyover operate through different channels in third world countries. The
study then reveals that although these mega projects benefited communication
system, it literally failed to fulfill public core demands and interests by
making people marginalized and vulnerable. Besides, this study explored that
mega projects like flyover are an outcome of bureaucratic decision in which social
and environmental impact assessment was ignored.