The intensity of extreme weather events, such as floods, storms, and heat waves, are expected to rise significantly due to climate change in the coming decades, presenting a formidable challenge for developing countries like Bangladesh in the upcoming years, as the country faces both socio-economic vulnerabilities and environmental degradation. Specifically, rural communities in Bangladesh are confronted with increasingly frequent floods, sudden flash floods, cyclones and river erosion, serving as a push factor for rural poor populations to migrate to urban areas, seeking better opportunities to cope with environmental challenges. Climate migrant women are usually more affected than men, as migrating to the big city is often not their own decision. Every year, thousands of migrant women come to the city of Chittagong with their families leaving their rural life behind to work mostly as a garment’s worker or a household help with their husbands working as day laborers. This paper investigates the lived experiences and subjective interpretations of urban public spaces among climate migrant women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, using a Feminist and Phenomenological lens. Employing a rigorous qualitative methodology involving in-depth interviews from 18 climate migrant women of Chittagong and participatory mapping, this study analyzes how intersecting vulnerabilities—related to gender, migration and lower socio-economic status shape their "Right to the City" with a specific focus on their experience of the urban public spaces of the city. The key finding reveals that the climate migrant women’s access to the public spaces of the city is severely constrained by three intertwined themes: (1) The Persistence of Patriarchal Surveillance on women, (2) Socio-Spatial Barriers as Forms of Exclusion, and (3) The Public Space as a Site of Negotiation and Economic Necessity. The analysis demonstrates that the status of "climate migrant women" serves as a multiplier of existing gender and economic disparities rather than an isolated driver of marginalization, highlighting a critical gap in conventional, consumption-oriented urban planning. The study contributes to the discourse on climate-just urban resilience by advocating for intersectional, participatory design strategies and emphasizes the necessity of intimate-scale, proximate, and gender-responsive spatial typologies in the urban environment to ensure the safety and inclusion of the most vulnerable residents of the city. This research also contributes new knowledge by providing a contextualized, gendered analysis of urban resilience in Chittagong, urging policymakers to address the invisible struggles of the climate vulnerable migrant women regarding their safety and spatial needs while navigating the exclusionary urban environments of the city.
Rubaiat Jannat (Sun,) studied this question.