6. Up-scaling production in the global garment industry

The technological and social changes go hand in hand with recent spatial-temporal changes of the industry at large. Over the last decade, many companies abandoned production sites in Dhaka city and set up new facilities at the outskirts of or also at some distance from Dhaka or Bangladesh’s major port in Chottogram. Given the boom in Dhaka’s real estate market, high-rise apartment buildings or shopping malls are more profitable for landowners than garment factories. Because their meagre wages do not allow them to commute, this forced also garment workers to move with the factories and abandon the slum settlements in Dhaka. These settlements or basti are an even more profitable target for real estate development.

At their new facilities outside the metropoles, RMG companies also have more space for the expansion as well as for the backward integration of their production, and for some of them – for building ‘green factories’ and boost the image of the industry.