Iffat Baki Bushra is an urban and transportation planner whose work explores the relationships between infrastructure, mobility, community participation, and the environments in which people live. She studied Urban and Regional Planning at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) before pursuing graduate study in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin.
Her work in Bangladesh has included research into land-use change and transportation. Her undergraduate thesis, completed with Nazifa Anzum, examined land-cover change along Bangladesh’s national highways and its relationship to road safety; the research received a student research grant from BUET’s Research and Innovation Centre for Science and Engineering.
For the University of Texas project Critical Perspectives on International Planning, Bushra documented the Submersible Embankment Project in Sunamganj, Bangladesh. Her case study looks at an unusual collaboration between government engineers and local residents to build, dismantle, and rebuild portions of flood-control infrastructure around the region’s seasonal agricultural and ecological cycles. She presents the project as an example of co-production in which local knowledge and community participation become integral parts of both infrastructure and placemaking.
Bushra joined Sidewalk Ballet to introduce the project and explore what it can teach us about community participation, infrastructure, and the ways people themselves help shape the places where they live.
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