F-commerce and Urban Modernities: The Changing Terrain of Housing Design in Bangladesh

This paper critically examines the impacts of social media-based business on urban residential architecture in Dhaka, Bangladesh and joins the growing body of work in critical HCI. Based on a seven-month-long qualitative empirical study in Dhaka, this paper reports how Facebook commerce (F-commerce) drives many local women to actively engage in home-based businesses, which in turn, challenges the inherent spatial regulations of modern residential architecture. This paper also documents how F-commerce mediated transformations in residential spaces are promoting heterogeneous functions, re-surfacing traditional values, and altering orders and rationales that define modern housing. Drawing from a rich body of literature in urban housing architecture, critical theories around modernism, South-Asian feminism, and postcolonial computing, we explain how these spatial transformations and alterations are “appropriating” architectural design vocabularies. Our findings further explain how negligence toward such emerging needs often marginalizes the women spatially and economically, who are involved in F-commerce. We conclude with design implications to architecture and HCI to address these issues, and connect our findings to the broader agendas of Postcolonial HCI around diversity, inclusion, and global development.