Korail: A city that rebuilds itself

Korail, with its dense population and intricate social and economic networks, is often described as a city within a city. For 23-year-old Asma Akter, born and raised in Korail's Boubazar, this self-contained ecosystem has also meant living through repeated cycles of loss and rebuilding. In her lifetime, she has watched her home burn to the ground twice.

Asma's family used to earn their living by renting out rooms while her father ran a footpath stall in Mohakhali. Then came the 2017 fire. Their tin-shed rooms, merchandise, and all their savings were reduced to ashes. The misery did not end there. A few months after the fire, a drive to clear footpath businesses forced them to give up the stall, cutting off the family's remaining source of income.

Rebuilding was a slow process. The family first borrowed money from relatives. With the corrugated tin sheets and tarpaulins provided by the government, they built a temporary shelter over the burnt house and spent the next two years living there. 

Over time, with borrowed money, small NGO loans, income from private tutoring, and other informal work, they rebuilt their lives. Tin-shed rooms were built again, along with a tin-roofed brick house and an eatery. It took them nearly eight years to recover from the disaster. Only one final instalment of Tk15,000 remained on the loan they took out after the 2017 fire.

Then, in November 2025, disaster struck again. Fire destroyed all the tin-shed rooms the family had rebuilt, along with the eatery that sustained their livelihood. Amid the chaos of the fire and the severe injuries suffered by several family members, the institutions that had financed their earlier recovery responded in sharply different ways. Some waived the remaining instalments on their loans, while others continued collecting repayments — even in the very month the fire occurred.

Years of rebuilding have left them with no savings, no financial cushion, and nowhere else to go. "The fire is part of our fate," Asma says.

In Korail, a fire rarely marks the end of life in an informal settlement; instead, it begins another cycle of rebuilding. Some came here after fires or floods elsewhere destroyed their homes, selling whatever land or belongings they had left in their villages. Others have moved from one slum to another, only to find themselves facing the same disaster again.

Papiya, who has lived in Korail's Barishal Patti since birth, has watched her home burn down three times. The first fire, in 2004, destroyed the family's bamboo-and-tin house. With little NGO presence in Korail at the time, they rebuilt it using their savings and loans from relatives. When another fire swept through the settlement in 2017, their tin-shed house was lost again. 

This time, with limited assistance from NGOs,  the family rebuilt with a semi-pucca structure. Then came the November 2025 fire, reducing that home to ashes once more. As they rebuild yet again, Papiya has chosen brick walls and a reinforced concrete roof instead of tin, believing it offers better protection against future fires.

Highlight: In Korail, the word 'landlord' can be misleading. Most of the people residents refer to as landlords own only the structures they have built — not the land beneath them. Their assets are the tin or brick rooms they rent out, while the ground itself remains entangled in decades of disputed ownership and the ever-present threat of eviction.

The decision reflects a lesson residents drew from the latest blaze. Now in Korail, bamboo walls have largely disappeared. Tin remains the dominant building material, but new brick-and-concrete rooms are rising where burned houses once stood.

This change is part of a much longer story. In the book City of Desire, architect Tanzil Shafique has shown how every major disaster leaves an architectural imprint on Korail. Even seemingly unrelated changes, such as the gradual widening of narrow lanes, often emerged not through formal planning but through local leaders rebuilding after disasters. 

In this vein, the 1998 flood accelerated the shift from plastic sheet roofs to stronger frames with corrugated iron roofs. After the 2004 fire, bamboo and sack-cloth walls gradually gave way to corrugated iron sheets that were easier to build in Korail's increasingly crowded lanes. By the fires of 2016 and 2017, many residents no longer saw tin houses as safe, and brick construction had become the new aspiration.

Similarly, eight months after the latest fire, another shift is beginning to emerge. Papiya and Asma are no longer stopping at tin roofs. Wherever savings, loans, or NGO support make it possible, they are casting concrete roofs instead. 

In the November 2025 fire, around 1,500 houses were burnt. About a third of those rooms have now been reconstructed as pucca bari. Landlords are spending anywhere from Tk2–3 lakh up to Tk30 lakh to rebuild their houses. Like the disasters before it, the 2025 fire appears to be reshaping not only what Korail is built from, but also what its residents imagine a safer home to be. 

But why do families continue investing years of labour, savings, and borrowed money in rooms standing on land that has a long history of fire — land they do not even legally own? 

The answer lies in Korail's housing economy. The settlement runs on its own web of landlords, tenants, caretakers, builders, lenders and neighbourhood networks. Here the word landlord can be misleading. Most of the people residents refer to as landlords own only the structures they have built — not the land beneath them. Their assets are the tin or brick rooms they rent out, while the ground itself remains entangled in decades of disputed ownership and the ever-present threat of eviction.

That ambiguity dates back to Korail's origins. A TBS investigation last year found that three groups now have claims over different parts of the settlement: the former Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Department (T&T), the Public Works Department (PWD), and former private landowners. 

Yet the settlement in its present form grew through an informal housing market that emerged in the 1990s, when vacant plots were occupied by politically connected actors, local strong men, and some T&T employees. They gradually built rooms and rented those out to low-income migrants arriving in Dhaka, laying the foundations of today's Korail.

Those who rent out rooms, however, are not all the same. In City of Desire, Shafique argues that Korail's earliest settlers rarely acquired legal ownership of the land. What they gained instead was community-recognised legitimacy — the informal acceptance that allowed them to build, remain, and eventually rent out rooms. 

Drawing on accounts from Korail's early residents, he traced how that legitimacy emerged differently across the settlement. 

In the south, one of the settlement's earliest settlers described securing a plot by paying not for the land itself, but for the accepted right to build and remain on it, negotiated directly with those already established there. 

In the north, employees of T&T were quietly allowed to farm and keep livestock on adjacent land, a small concession that gradually evolved into an accepted claim. Over time, these two histories expanded until they merged into the densely interconnected Korail that exists today.

That history still shapes the settlement. Because a family's claim often rests on informal recognition rather than legal title, walking away can mean losing that claim altogether to whoever occupies the plot next. Rebuilding, however costly, becomes a way of protecting not just a home, but the family's only enduring asset.

This raises an uncomfortable question: if the land was never legally theirs, how could the government legally support rehabilitation? Is there a way to protect families trapped in repeated cycles of disaster without simply transferring ownership of the land? 

For landscape architect Khondaker Hasibul Kabir, who resided in Korail for six years, the question begins with housing rather than land ownership. "Ensuring housing is one of the state's responsibilities," he said. "People live in Korail for many different reasons. Securing their housing should be a priority for both government and non-government actors." 

In his view, rehabilitation should be planned with residents, not for them. 

Kabir pointed to Thailand's Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) as one model worth examining. Thailand faced a similar challenge: millions of people were living on land they did not legally own. Rather than treating it as a legal impasse, the government approached it as a housing problem. 

Since 2003, CODI has channelled state-backed loans and infrastructure subsidies directly to community organisations, allowing residents to collectively plan and rebuild their settlements instead of leaving each household to recover on its own. For Kabir, the lesson for Korail is not about transferring ownership of public land. It is that long-term leases and other forms of secure tenure could allow the government to support rehabilitation.

In Korail, however, rebuilding still remains largely a private burden. Attempts by TBS to obtain comment from the Dhaka North City Corporation on post-fire rehabilitation went unanswered. While successive government plans have acknowledged the need for housing in Korail, residents say those discussions have yet to translate into a system for rebuilding after disasters. 

According to residents, recovery depended largely on loans from local lenders, NGO instalment loans, relatives and neighbours. No major fire in Korail's history has been followed by institutional support covering the actual cost of reconstruction. What arrives instead is a short period of emergency relief. According to several residents, assistance following the November 2025 fire had largely ended by the first week of February. 

"Only few people who know NGO representatives really get help," said Papiya. "They don't usually speak directly with residents; they work through local representatives." 

Without a formal system, many said they struggled to distinguish genuine aid workers from opportunists. Asma recalled that while some people promised assistance and never returned, another offered to rebuild the family's hotel, only to demand a percentage of its future earnings in return. 

Recovery is also deeply unequal. Families who own rental rooms can at least borrow to rebuild and, once construction is complete, regain a source of income. Tenants have no such asset to fall back on. A 2022 BUET policy brief found that Korail residents spend around 67% of their household income on rent alone, often paying more per square foot than tenants in affluent neighbourhoods such as Dhanmondi or Banani. For families already spending most of what they earn simply to keep a roof over their heads, a fire leaves little room to recover.

That was the reality for Rotna Akter, a second-year intermediate student. The money her family had saved for her education was instead spent replacing household essentials destroyed in the fire. She also recalled feeling unsafe during relief distribution.

"There were so many outsiders, and nobody came with any protocol," she said. "We didn't know whom to trust. Many people had bad intentions."

The absence of coordinated institutional support extends beyond financial assistance. Residents said most of the rebuilding has been carried out by local masons, with no technical or architectural guidance despite the settlement's long history of devastating fires.

For Khondaker Hasibul Kabir, the problem is not a lack of professionals willing to help; it is the absence of a system that lets them do so. Because residents have no legal claim to the land, he argued, aid often cannot be routed to them through formal channels. Kabir suggested that secure tenure arrangements could provide exactly the kind of legal bridge Korail currently lacks, letting communities access planning, technical assistance and reconstruction support collectively rather than alone. 

Eight months after the last fire, Korail has rebuilt itself once again. Houses have changed with every flood and every fire, each generation carrying the lessons of the last. What has changed far less is the system around them. For Asma and Papiya, rebuilding remains less a matter of rehabilitation than of survival — financed by debt, sustained by neighbours and repeated because, for many, there is simply nowhere less risky to build a life.