Fuzzy neighbourhoods in urban Bangladesh: perceived boundaries, administrative misfit, and everyday governance

Neighbourhood boundaries underpin area-based governance, participation, and service allocation, yet policy units rarely reflect how residents understand neighbourhoods. Drawing on 92 interviews, 20 focus groups, filed audits, walk-through, and land-use analysis in Dhaka and Khulna, this paper examines perceived neighbourhoods. Residents experienced neighbourhoods as overlapping, nested, fluid, and internally partitioned, shaped by built-form, everyday activity spaces, walking access, social relations, belonging, tenure, and permanence. Wealth, power, gendered mobility, migration intensity, density, and amenity distribution further differentiated perceptions. The paper argues for combining official units with resident-defined geographies and recognizing tenant and informal communities as legitimate neighbourhood constituencies.