This project examines the entangled relationship between humanitarianism, colonial history, and the garment industry in Bangladesh. What began as a reflection on the ethics of foreign intervention and the power dynamics that continue to shape global labor systems evolved into a more specific exploration of housing for garment workers inside of these power dynamics. It questions how we, as outsiders, can meaningfully engage in contexts shaped by histories we did not live, but are nevertheless complicit in through the products we consume.
The research traces the path from Bangladesh’s rich textile heritage to the present-day realities of fast fashion, where exploitation persists under new names. It unpacks how colonial patterns of extraction have reconfigured into modern systems of labor and aid, where garment workers, often women from rural areas, are caught in cycles of migration, dependency, and vulnerability.
Against this backdrop, the project focuses on the reopening of the Sylhet Textile Mill as a site for reimagining housing for workers. Drawing from both rural housing traditions and lessons from existing factory environments, it proposes an alternative model that addresses the realistic conditions shaping workers’ lives, not as passive recipients of aid, but as people navigating a deeply uneven global system.

This research paper focuses on a time in which contentious politics created more tensions between the youth and government, and how this conflict flourished into a social construct of new spaces. These concepts are to be explained further on in the paper. In order to provide an understanding of the relationship between contentious politics and spaces as social constructs, the case study of the Kargadoor in Utrecht will be investigated. This study emphasizes the role that Koos van Duinen, the author of this paper’s grandfather, played in this context.