The floor of a hospital in Dhaka has become the primary ward because the elevators and beds are permanently broken.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
"The Elevator Doesn't Stop Here": Vertical Bottlenecks, Broken Infrastructure, and the Floor as Bed at Mugda Medical Hospital
SSRN · 6606398
The Takeaway
Physical infrastructure failure creates a state of abandonment-in-plain-sight for sick patients. When a building's systems collapse, the very space within the hospital starts to marginalize the people it was meant to save. We often focus on the shortage of medicine or doctors when discussing healthcare crises. This study highlights the visceral experience of how a failing building actively harms the human body. The floor is not just a surface but a symbol of a system that has fundamentally given up on its citizens.
From the abstract
Public hospitals in dense urban settings are frequently studied through the lens of resource scarcity, yet the lived experience of patients caught within that scarcity remains under-examined. This paper presents a phenomenological ethnography of one day of silent shadowing on the eighth floor of Mugda Medical Hospital, a large public facility in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Through a lifeworld framework organized around spatiality, temporality, intersubjectivity, embodiment, and mood, the study examines w