Lefebvre in the digital city: trans-spatial contestations and the co-evolution of protest and control in Dhaka

Abstract

This paper examines the evolving dynamics of protest in urban Bangladesh by analysing the temporal interplay between public space, activism, and state control. Social movements have played a crucial role in shaping Bangladesh’s political landscape, from the 1971 liberation struggle to the transition to parliamentary democracy in the early 1990s. Over time, the spatial tactics and forms of these movements have shifted. Drawing on ethnography in Dhaka, this paper extends Lefebvre’s triadic spatial model into a trans-spatial, conjunctural, and temporally recursive framework that reveals protest space as dynamically co-produced across digital and physical terrains. The concept of trans-spatiality captures how resistance traverses street, screen, and body, generating affective and symbolic inscriptions. It theorises protest space as produced through three intersecting dialectics: between abstract and lived space in the physical realm, between algorithmic abstraction and digital lived space, and between physical and digital terrains. The paper, thus, offers a framework to understand urban protest spatialities as dynamic, historically layered, and digitally entangled.

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