Cities are strange things; they are neither given to us as found objects like a shell on the beach nor are they conjured up in a dream out of thin air1. Cities are destination, of an assiduous search or a meticulous plan. We are not certain of finding them, yet we know that they can’t be found if we don’t start to found them. In the Latin classic The Aeneid, Aeneas, the hero of Troy, leaves home with an entourage to found a new city that came to be known as Rome; the journey for the city becomes the odyssey. The Aztecs wandered over mountains and forests following a sacred sign before they founded the city of Tenochtitlan on a lake (that later became Mexico City). And, in the Candi-mangal, Kalaketu builds a new city following carefully a visionary plan, and the city becomes a successful experiment in sociological formation. These narratives indicate that to find a city that one is looking for may take a prolonged wandering or bit of a sustained effort.
Even as we celebrate the past 400 years of the city of Dhaka, we wonder whether we have found the city that we have been looking for, or whether at all we have started a journey. For such a journey is preceded by a vision or a utopia. Where is Dhaka’s utopia?
The term utopia retains negative connotations affixed either to a fantasy of the bizarre or pathology of the unobtainable. But utopia is primarily generative, based on critiques of the present to propose a better future. From Thomas More’s humanist society and Renaissance ideal cities to modern urban visions, the image of the city and social utopia have been inseparable in imagining a promised and future landscape. Realism is usually invoked as a counter-thesis of utopia, but realism itself is a fiction we prop up to maintain and benefit from a debilitating status quo or hide our inability to come out of the shadows. Daniel Burnham, the 19th century American architect who designed parts of Chicago and Washington DC, said decisively: “We need to dream lest we become like owls accustomed to the night and thinking there is no such thing as light.”
Well-meaning detractors will ask why clamor for the city when apparently more crucial things are at stake. Bangladesh continues to be seen as a rural civilization (with some bursts of industrial islands at best), and therefore much of the cultural discourse, including political and institutional programs, champions the ideology of an eternal “gram bangla.” But in the last thirty years or so, something dramatic has happened: an urban movement has taken hold of the country.2 More and more people now live in cities, and if they do not, they participate in its dynamic, making cities and towns no longer minor parties in the national project but vigorous sites of human habitations, relationships and economies (the result places a big question mark on the “eternal” nature of “gram bangla”). If cities are the battlegrounds of our anxieties, they are also the decisive locus of our imaginations and capabilities. And that is why cities require a more imaginative and critical attention; they cannot be addressed through technical or legislative considerations alone. Cities do not begin from policies, but from dreams and visions.
The future of Dhaka city is the future of the country. While it is imperative to plan the urban landscape of the whole country, from primary cities to small towns, from the mahanagar to the mofussil, Dhaka will continue to play a vital role in impacting places far and wide. In the absence of any solid tradition of civic urban culture, Dhaka city remains the sole model of urban development in the country. It is ironic that every small town, every nook and corner in the mofussil, wishes to mimic a dysfunctional Dhaka. Buildings, grouping of buildings, roads, institutions and commerce in the small towns are all beginning to look like some pale imitation of things Dhaka. It is in that sense the future landscape of the country depends on what we make of Dhaka city. Cities, therefore, require the boldest thinking, especially when our cities – again Dhaka as ‘role model’ – continue to exemplify the ignoble conditions of a malfunctioning system. Why should we then not demand from the political elite a clearer vision for the future of our cities and towns, recognition of the importance of planning cities in the national agenda, and more definitive plan for Dhaka.
What a City is
The city continues to taunt us as we have not yet made peace with it. The notion of the city has not yet settled comfortably in our cultural imagination, as a result of which our urban discourse remains naïve and undeveloped. We see the city nothing more than a cauldron of crises and problems. But before we proceed to solve the city's myriad problems, it is crucial to gather a consensus on what we mean by the city.
A city is civilization. The city today has become harder and harder to define, yet that persistent, ancient idea is still conveyed by the popular English term. The term “city” is linked to the Latin word civitas and to civilization and citizen, and therefore describes the finest form of civic, collective life.3 To Jaime Lerner, former mayor of the miraculous Brazilian city of Curitiba, the future is in cities and cities can be the most beautiful collective dream.4 He rejects the notion that the city is a problem; it is, in fact, the solution to collective existence.
The city is the most obvious spatial condition of how we should live as social group in a civic and humanistic manner. Cities require buildings, but buildings alone do not make a city. Cities are socio-psychical facts; they express, according to the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, our being and consciousness (which led Lefebvre to write “the right to cities,” a manifesto for a transformed city and egalitarian participation in urban life). The first tag – socio – is comparatively easier to address, but the psychical facts are irksome to many trying to unravel the mystery of the city.
The comprehension of our own cities is far more rudimentary. In the grand sweep of our agricultural rhetoric, our deep and ancient sentiment for the soil, we continue to see the city as a curse, a sentiment that is old as the Vedic suspicion of the city. Most of our poets and writers sing only the song of the village, producing an unrelenting imagination around the mythic village; no wonder that most of the political elites are in a perpetual tension with the city. We fail to acknowledge the emerging truth that for the first time in human history nearly half of the planetary population is now urban dwellers, and in the context of Bangladesh, the city is now as essential and crucial as the paddy-field.
What Dhaka Can be
Dhaka is not a city, yet. What is touted as “growth” in Dhaka is actually the pillaging of the city in the name of progress and development. Dhaka has no cohesive plan and proceeds only with bursts of ad-hoc decisions, usually taken by bureaucrats, ministers or half-baked professionals with no deep knowledge of and abiding love for the city. The city is being built furiously but without a language for building, that is, without a language for streets, a language for open spaces, a language for the river’s edge, a language for housing. The end result is the same as elsewhere where the city is left to such dysfunctionalism: remorseless development, curse of pollution, heightening social inequality, unpredictability of services, increasing break-down of community (moholla), wretched transport and road system, blatant occupation of land and waterways, ravaging of open spaces, and lack of models of how people should live collectively. Being in the top ten populous cities of the world, and one of the most densely inhabited places on earth is not an accolade but a passage towards an ecological and social cataclysm. Unless that is stemmed by desire and design.
The poet Shamsur Rahman wrote about Dhaka, “This city daily wrestles with the wolf with many faces.” Nearly thirty years of relentless greed, political nonchalance, and administrative inefficiency has positioned the city towards a calamitous future. From what was truly a garden city on water, Dhaka now faces a certain civic and environmental deterioration. With failures in urban planning and management, development has fallen largely to private interests, which often act without regard to natural resources, urban context, or community benefit. As a chaotic urban development places increasing strain on its social and environmental fabric, the people of Dhaka must negotiate a civic deterioration that is, ironically, aggravated in the name of progress and growth. Thus the paradox of city-building: one can destroy a city by building it.
A well-functioning city is designed and meticulously planned which then is diligently implemented; it simply does not happen on its own. While there should always be latitudes in design, a city begins and proceeds with a plan, one that has both poetry and pragmatism. Dhaka dearly needs a vision of what it can be, what is possible, and what is more profitable in every respect. Development and investment should follow that plan.
And the plan should be based on urbanism, on the quality of urban culture, and not urbanization, a set of abstract statistics and economic parameters. The term “urbanization” describes the dark side of the modern city: migration, malfunction and misery; it does not show how a city can be lived in its fullest human, social, aesthetical and ecological potential. Those ideas are taken up by the term “urbanism.” We have to overcome our ambivalence of the city, and declare a positive and proactive manifesto about our urban destination.
Dhaka needs a bold and creative plan that addresses its tropical, hydrological, and civic conditions. We need to conceive, first of all, the idea of a tropical city in the twenty-first century. Far from being a situation of calamity, Dhaka can become a tropical model that responds to the particular geological and environmental conditions of a deltaic place. Even until the 1950s, with its spacious green spaces, majestic trees, crisscrossing canals, civilized riverbanks, and boats plying through the heart of the city, Dhaka promised to be both a garden city and a place by the water. With buildings in a setting of lakes, gardens, orchards, and parks, Dhaka can still set the model for a tropical city. Only then it can be billed as a Bengali city, and a truly sustainable one.5
And, secondly, any vision for Bangladesh will have to consider the emerging urban landscape not as a cause for crises but as vast opportunities. Dhaka can be a city for change, a smart city positioned globally in the age of trans-nationalism. Cities are not merely dire sites of institutional and social failures that need constant remedial attention; if properly organized, they can be economic, social, and cultural dynamos. Bangladesh’s potential for utilising its human resources in the new era of global economy remains largely untapped, and yet there are ways by which Dhaka (and other towns and cities) can be oriented towards a unique development programme merging urbanism and economic growth.6
For all that is wrong and all that is calamitous, Dhaka can still be a laboratory for a balanced urban dynamic. The profile of a new Dhaka may emerge from the following considerations.
A Liquid Landscape
Dhaka is a child of the Buriganga, and yet it turns its back to the fundamental reality of being part of the world’s most dynamic hydrological system. Too few planners, no city fathers, and even the people of the city remember that Dhaka is a tender land-mass framed by three rivers and a fluid landscape. This is the most central issue for beginning any discussion on the future of Dhaka. Dhaka cannot forget its genealogy, for that forgetfulness will be reciprocated by dreadful environmental effects. An audacious vision for Dhaka has to begin from where Dhaka began at the edge of the water: To think about Dhaka not from the center but from the edge. The edge is where the solutions are. The Dutch urbanist and architect Rem Koolhaas considers the edge (of the city) as a beautiful urban form. Although Koolhaas meant the ambiguous edge of the post-industrial European city, the important implication is that the edge is the new urban challenge.
Idea of a linear city along future eastern embankment with wetlands and agriculture inside and controlled exchange of water (Takao Ugai and Cham Wadu, University of Hawaii, 2010).
What is that “edge” that will help us to re-conceptualize the city? The edge describes the rivers and the hydrological and aquatic landscape that frames Dhaka. The first task is to consider carefully how the edge should be defined and what should be the language of that edge condition even if it is a fluctuating one. We need to re-think that Dhaka is a precious land-mass surrounded by rivers, canals, wetlands, and agricultural landscape; how Dhaka, in fact, is like an island. It is clear that the battle for Dhaka is being fought over the edge, what with encroachment of rivers, filling up wetlands, buying off of agricultural lands, and the wholesale transformation of a precious ecological system (in the name of “housing societies”). New models of urbanism that respect the ecological requirements of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of the master plan and embrace the economic desires of development are possible through creative propositions. It need not be an either/or situation; there could be options that do not see the ecological ethics in simple conflict with development models.
Dhaka is a deltaic city, and water forms the matrix of the city. It is not a simple image of a picturesque landscape; it implies communication, drainage, economic life, festivity, and a certain way of being. Working with water and embracing wetness mean working with a total environmental relationship. The rivers, the wetlands, the flood plains, the eighty inches of rain per year, the drainage are all tied in an intricate relationship. A deltaic city cannot be developed by economic desires alone. We have to evolve our desires and imaginations from the mathematics of the delta.
Planning around land and water (and not land versus water, which is how conventional planning thinks) could give Dhaka a very unique characteristic distinguishing it from the other cities of the world. As co-writer and architect Saif Ul Haque notes: “Water could provide inexpensive transport solution for the city, it could serve as reservoirs for containing monsoon rains, it could provide for valuable protein for the city dwellers by fish farming, and it could help in keeping the underground water table stable by way of percolation and other methods.” A new vision for Dhaka has to begin from the precious landscape of wetlands and agricultural terrain, ushering a conception of a city that integrates urbanism, agriculture, and flood. We need to realize that we can try to take the city out of the delta, but we cannot take the delta out of the city.
A City That Is Dispersed and a City That is Contained
The foci of Dhaka need to be radically reorganized. Dhaka is “growing” in its own happy rhythm, tickled every now and then by fragmentary official initiatives. This “growth” is neither relieving pressures at the centers nor creating a liveable urban development. The whole city and its peripheries should be brought under an active and aggressive planning net and coordinated development spurs. New urban nodes as townships should be created, and existing and congested centers revitalized so that selective commerce, institutions, and government offices may be dispersed across the urban region in a uniform way.
A thorough balance should be established between needs and obligations. Once that is done, it should be maintained with rigorous vigilance. A wider Dhaka can be conceived by creating new nodal and satellite towns within the administrative reach of Dhaka but also expanding to regional towns as Manikganj, Munshiganj, and Gazipur. The first circle could be developed as nodal townships within Dhaka, and the second ring of existing towns could be energized to create a network of satellite towns. The new modal towns should be high density developments with selective commerce, institutions and government offices. Such reorganization depends on a new network of movements that connect the nodes, and this is where the much talked about circular water and rail routes come in.
The following should be the manifesto for Dhaka’s planning: (a) Selective decentralization: Spreading out the pressures from the existing city. (b) Creating a network of nodal and satellite towns. (c) Restoring the older city, and revitalizing it. (d) Creating new urban nodes, and revamping existing ones. (e) Delineating the built periphery of the city, and maintaining it. (f) Creating a new network of movements connecting the nodes.
City = Mobility
It is obvious that Dhaka’s future is in a de-pressurized regional city made of a matrix of a new and revitalized nodes and towns. For Dhaka to spread out and yet remain connected requires a successful transport system.
Dhaka requires a radical restructuring of its transportation network to sustain itself as a city. There are three responses for Dhaka’s traffic trouble: Mass transit! Mass transit!! Mass transit!!! The only rapid solution is to introduce systems that will bring in and move as many people as required in as less number of vehicles as possible. We identify three crucial sectors – rail, bus and waterway – where new transportation modes may be implemented without facing too many infrastructural and constructional challenges.
Transportation hub linking rail, road and water (Ashraf with Masudul Islam Shammo, 2010).
Dhaka has a perfect condition for a circular rail (and road) system that rings the city with cross-city links. The circular rail (conceived along the embankment) could also be an opportunity for creating new and revitalized urban nodes along its line. For the cross-city rail system, Dhaka’s main train hub may be shifted from Kamlapur to Tongi. There is no particular locational benefit to Kamlapur as all train destinations pass by Tongi. By shifting the station to Tongi will free the train line from Tongi to Naryanganj for a faster and frequent commuter train system serving the city. The Tongi-Naryanganj Line may be the start point for more elaborate commuter system that is present in current transportation planning strategies. At a future phase, an elevated track may be constructed over the existing lines for a faster, express line.
Buses continue to be the accepted mode of urban mass traveling but are hardly effective mass transit. A thorough revision of bus network and travel mode is needed where eco-friendly vehicles carrying large number of passengers may be introduced on dedicated routes. This will require a few things: Freeing left lane as dedicated routes for special and designated buses, and creating special designed bus stands for faster transfer and passenger loading. To implement the system quickly and effectively, tax benefit and other incentives may be provided to private investors and operators.
Water-based transportation system for Dhaka is a natural choice in a water-borne geography. Regularised and extensive water-transport system will also be a way of ensuring the effective use and control of rivers and canals, and their edges. The way Dhaka has turned its back to its rivers may be reversed by implementing a strong riverine transit system. For the riverine system to be effective, multi-modal stations need to be created that are conveniently linked with other transportation loops. As river stations can be hub of riverside development and spur for energetic growth, the planning of such hubs should be done carefully in order to control haphazard development. The waterway system can also be extended into the heart of the city after clearing up and deepening some of the encroached canals. With the completion of the Hatirjheel and Gulshan Lake redevelopment projects, water-taxis will be able to link, for example, Gulshan and Kawranbazar.
Urban spaces are the most precious ingredients of a city considering that buildings alone do not make a city, but buildings and spaces in a well-knit fabric. Spaces could be varied and wide-ranging, from formal to informal, from large-scale to intimate, from South Plaza at Sherebanglanagar to space outside Gausia Market. Large spaces include areas of assembly, maidans, parks, gardens, lakefronts, riverfronts, etc., while small spaces may just be an intersection of two lanes, space under a tree on a sidewalk, or just a broad sidewalk. Dhaka one time had an enviable resource of such spaces; now they have either vanished or are vanishing in an avalanche of greed and manipulation.
Parks, gardens & ponds as public spaces along riverbanks
(Chretien Macutay and Aarthi Padmanabhan, University of Hawaii, 2009).
The city of Dhaka used to be synonymous with trees: flower-bearing, scent-giving trees, trees that marked the passing of the seasons, trees that gave shade, and trees that added to a healthy environment. A model in the mind is the street in front of Dhaka Medical College, or what it used to be, a most dignified row of shadow-giving, corridor-creating trees, or a street intersection in Becharam Dewry with a banyan tree creating a cool space-defining public square. But that was then, when we were a bit more civic-minded, and concerned about the larger scheme of things. The climate of Dhaka desires it to be a garden city, a city of trees, flowers and foliage. “Light, Green, Air!” that old modernist slogan that produced cities like Chandigarh and Brasilia is not as defunct as one thinks.
The sidewalk (or the footpath) is the supreme mark of the civility of a city; it belongs to the culture of walking, strolling and promenading. The quality of sidewalks gives evidence to what the city managers think about a fundamental human condition: The pedestrian and her humanity. Dhaka shows no such conception. It’s a city where driving a car has become an essential symbol, and the poor pedestrian just a pitiable creature at the bottom of the totem-pole. Such urban pedestrian devices as boulevards, promenades, riverwalks, and just simple sidewalks that are the hall mark of all livable cities are completely non-existent in Dhaka.
Promenade along riverbank (Ashraf with Masudul Islam Shammo, 2009).
The pedestrian and the sidewalk is ultimately an indictment on the car, on its ultimate effect of the automobile on the natural environment (through pollution, etc.), urban exchange (disruption of the public realm), and social interaction (segregation of classes). A successful pedestrian infrastructure means relying mostly on a set of public transportation such as railways, buses, vans, trams, ferries, and such public spaces as elevated and moving walkways, tunnels, footbridges and regular sidewalks. If we could walk, many of us would not need to drive cars.7
Housing is the Fabric of the City
Housing is the material and social fabric of the city, and yet housing is Dhaka’s greatest failure. Despite what seems like a developer’s boomtown, Dhaka has not been able to create suitable residential models for the many different communities that inhabit it. There simply has been no vision of how we should live as a group in our emerging urban conditions.
Housing is more than a numerical and fiscal matter; it is the key to enhancing the quality of life, both that of the immediate dwellers and the overall city. The platoon of housing experts has not been able to provide any vision of how we should live as a group in new urban scenarios. The public sector housing, catering to government and corporation employees still continues along the defunct line of building one block after another with no thoughts for social spaces. The limited and lower income groups have been completely ignored in the housing equation. The middle-class is making do with what it can in the brutal housing and rental market. The planners and experts are still floundering with two dull-witted models: the individual plot with the independent bungalow-style house, and the individual plot with a box-style apartment building.
Housing density study: (a) a conventional layout for a planned Dhaka neighborhood with 840 units (6 storey), (b) pair of units forming interior courts with 960 units (6 storey), (c) semi-tower blocks with 1540 units (Lori Walker and Tessa Pobanz, University of Hawaii, 2010).
High-density group housing (Vitti-Saif Ul Haque Sthapati Consortium, 2010).
The unimaginative strategy of making new housing areas by plotting and subdividing land should be ceased immediately, and alternative imaginative models of mass or group housing should be explored. Dhanmandi that started off as a “model” residential area using the plotting mechanism has now been disfigured beyond recognition by new living and economic imperatives. Dhanmandi could be better. Instead of building up on a plot, for example, in an isolated manner, 8 to 10 plots could be pooled together and developed as one single housing complex with various shared internal facilities including generous open spaces, gardens, meeting and play areas, a shop or two for the whole complex. Similar strategies may be taken for Uttara, Purbachal and other so-called planned towns. Loan and tax incentives may be offered for initiating projects like this in existing built conditions such as Dhanmandi and Banani. For newer areas under planning, such group housing should be introduced by regulation.
The idea of “housing for all” by 2015, as declared by the Awami League government in its election manifesto, along with the “growth-center centric village housing” in every union and upazila, is certainly a powerful one but remains vague if no hint is given on what kind of housing, how it will be delivered and how it will first constitute a human settlement and social habitation.
Housing is ultimately about building communities. This is critical in the context of Dhaka today when older structure of communities (moholla) is fast disappearing, and the current patterns of residential models is not encouraging community building. Dhaka has become a city of fragments, with its social cohesiveness tattering away, broken down to the individual households living in their walled enclaves. The truth is that the general form of a city - its physical and spatial configuration - is capable of nurturing or disrupting the nature of communities. The current framework of plot-based residential “development” will not lead to community building.
A housing manifesto for Dhaka should be based on the following: (a) Stopping the planning of plots. (b) Developing group housing complexes, and building exemplary housing and housing complexes. (c) Providing housing incentives at all economic levels, especially the lower income. (d) Innovating mechanisms for private developers to supply housing at all income levels.
Urban Assets
A city thrives when it values its assets, and those could be buildings, natural spaces, built open spaces and urban districts. While this may be obvious, sometimes the obvious is not that obvious in Dhaka.
In this city, there are indeed many Dhakas. Dhaka has given rise to several urban morphologies, each of which represents a particular social, economic and environmental destiny. In the older city, hugging the river, colorful mixed-use buildings are crowded cheek-by-jowl along narrow, winding streets in tradition-bound neighborhoods. Further from the river in the Ramna area is the old colonial quarter, studded with bungalow-and-garden type governmental, cultural and residential buildings, many of which were built during the colonial rule. Louis Kahn’s Parliamentary Complex is another distinctive area in the city’s urban and social fabric that represents a world-class urban ensemble of buildings, lakes, orchards and parks. The so-called planned residential areas created as plotted properties with individual buildings were the most distinctive development of the 1960s and later (a morphology that is now undergoing radical transformation). Alongside these formal areas, however, are vast, amorphous swaths of largely unplanned residential and commercial growths that are glaring symptoms of planning failure in addressing the rapid transformation of the city.
It would be a pity if all of Dhaka began to look the same because of uniform development orientations and planning regulations. Certain areas in the city - “urban treasures” or heritage-rich areas - should be immediately marked as special zones, and every means adopted to preserve them through differentiated regulations and uses. Such areas include Wari, Chowk, Shakhari Bazar, Alia Mia Talao, Balda Garden, etc.
Building as a catalytic event has often been an occasion to give new cultural and economic impetus to a city. What was once a dreary urban environment has often been turned around at the physical, psychological and economical level by the creation of a new and inspiring work of architecture. Such is the power of good architecture: a single building or complex that can change the life of a city.
If Sherebanglanagar was a spark produced in the 1960s by Louis Kahn, Dhaka needs few more impetuses now. There are critical areas in the city that need to be addressed in the most creative way before they are vandalized by illegal invasions or officially by poor planning. Such areas should be developed in an exemplary way to inspire and edify, as well as open them up for new urban experiences. The old airport area is waiting patiently to be used as a new gift to the city (until that happens one cannot understand why that area cannot be enjoyed as a public park). The central jail could be relocated at a new location and the area opened up for new park, cultural, recreational and selective residential uses for the people of old Dhaka. The BGB area at Peelkhana could similarly be renovated. The totality of such catalysis could go towards a dynamic transformation of the city.
All these understandably may take time and resources, and that is why it is imperative for the government to form an Urban Task Force, empowered with the proper authority and manned by the right expertise that begins to address some of these things. The Urban Task Force should take a stance on the following (to create short-term and long-term goals): an overall intelligent plan for Dhaka; and, urban strategies for the whole country. The latter suggests a coordinated and managed development of a network of primary cities and smaller towns with precise ideas about the constitution of such cities keeping in mind interlinked issues of housing, transport, public spaces, wetlands and waterways, and their regional impacts. As I have claimed elsewhere, and I truly believe, if there is a political will, there will be a way out of perdition. And if the political parties who claim authority over our destiny have set us up on a dream time with calls for social justice, environmental protection, economic equality, good governance and human rights, why should we not add to that life in the city that is truly civilized and modern, and Bengali.
Epilog: Three Catalyses
Dhaka needs critical interventions in selected sites that will be models for transforming of the city. The projected developments will be urban catalysts, acupuncture in the miasma-ridden body of the city in order to develop a clear and distinctive language for exemplary developments.
A satellite view of Dhaka clearly reveals the immensity of the water system that surrounds Dhaka and penetrates the edges like a vascular tissue. The satellite view also makes it obvious that amidst that watery landscape, Dhaka is surrounded by a region of undefined settlements, some of which are established, while others are in the throes of a helter-skelter evolution. They are a product of both planning callousness and development abuse; that is, whatever planning exists for some of those areas is poor both in conception and implementation, and whatever development goes on is short-sighted and simply troubling. I hold the view that a condition of dystopia is also an occasion for imaginative renovation. Such sites of urban disarray provoke a strategy where pockets of intervention can be identified for creating new paradigms of city-building.
I identify three areas as potential sites of critical interventions for the remaking of Dhaka city:
Revitalizing Sadarghat
The redevelopment of Sadarghat could be a catalyst for an economic and social rejuvenation of not just old Dhaka but the whole city. Sadarghat remains one of the most dynamic areas in Dhaka, but its fullest potential has not yet been realised. In fact, from being a historic civic space and an energetic urban place, the area has now become the symbol of sharp physical, social and environmental deterioration. With thoughtful and imaginative planning, Sadarghat could be transformed befitting the riverfront of any decent city.
A “riverfront district” with a new authority can be designated with Sadarghat as the epicenter for the purpose of producing and maintaining a clean river, a civic riverfront and a sustainable and exemplary riverfront district enjoyable for and accessible to everyone. The district will exhibit model public spaces and civic buildings designed especially for a riverfront condition.
The single goal of the riverfront development is to return the riverbank to the city. That would simply mean that the banks (to a certain clear width) should be decreed as public space allowing uninterrupted access for people where no private encroachment and building of any sort will be allowed. The whole length of the riverbank in the district should be developed as a tree-shaded promenade, largely a pedestrian public space that is linked to other open and green spaces, historic sites, and special purpose buildings creating a clear and legible pedestrian network. Parks and gardens, even floating ones on the river (on barges), could be part of that network. One foresees dynamic activities on and along the river through the systematic promotion of boat racing, water pageants, floating restaurants and various tourism related enterprises.
It is obvious that to have riverbanks, one needs to have a river. The dynamicity of the river, along with its canals (whichever are remaining), should be recovered and maintained by eliminating adverse features and modifying some of the existing conditions (a drive that is ongoing). A re-planned and reconstituted Sadarghat can be a more powerful economic engine than what it is at present catering both to the vibrant economy of the old city and new economic bonanza. This may be achieved through new commercial generators, such as well-planned shops and markets, modern business centers, hotels, restaurants, eateries and other enterprises, including large scale cultural and entertainment centers.
Intensifying the City: Tongi
Despite a seemingly dense and overbuilt reality, there are areas in and around Dhaka that suffer from low or poor urban intensity. While some of these areas have designated urban administration, they are in fact far less than being urban. From Tongi in the north to Savar in the west and Keraniganj in the south, there are “para-urban” pockets that await a systematic urban intensification than the pell-mell urbanization taking place.
There are many such opportunities in this city of a reckless future. Take Tongi for example, a curious urban configuration that one would be hard-pressed to call even a “township.” Tongi is divided blatantly along the Dhaka-Gazipur Road. On the western side, there is a somewhat disciplined layout of industrial lots, while on the east is a wild melee of dwellings, factories, industries, shops, markets, vestigial lands that do not come together to forge an efficacious urban community. Tongi is a good example of how old agricultural lands have tumbled pell-mell into ad-hoc land divisions and usages without an urban identity and coherence. Tongi is but one example of such areas in Dhaka: settled, populated, urbanised but without urbanism.
There still remains a great opportunity for converting Tongi, and areas like that, into a highly planned and effective urban fabric. I describe such a development as an urban “acupuncture” as it not only affects, positively, the immediate area but also offers multiple dividends for the rest of the city. Such a development is also an opportunity to plan the “outer ring” of Dhaka city that can give new impetus to developments in those rings.
The whole of Tongi area can come under a special planning action that can systematically convert it into a denser, planned and truly urban place that is socially and economically richer. Reorganization of a vast part of Tongi is easily possible that might create new garments factory district with demarcated areas for factories, offices and warehouses, and housing and amenities for the workers with efficient transportation network. Similarly, an IT district may also be conceived where people can be trained in the emerging industry and setup of outsourcing stations. Only then, Tongi may be reincarnated into a modern industrial town, and a proper gateway to Dhaka.
Tongi can also become the model of an “eco-city” that maintains a balanced relationship of development and ecology with the use of river and its banks. The area around the bridge, along the banks of the Turag, can be developed as an arts district with carefully designed buildings in a setting of parks and public places. The arts district may house a set of civic buildings such as a convention center (along with a hotel complex) that can become a new urban focus for the city. The edge of the river can be a long promenade that connects the bend of Turag in Asulia in the west to the railway crossings in the east.
Building on the Flood-Plains
The touchiest topic in Dhaka is the business of building on the flood-plains, that is, the refiguring of the city’s edge. A land-water form that was characterized by an intricate network of canals, ponds, agricultural fields and wetlands all ultimately linked to the river is being aggressively changed simply by land-filling and creating dubious “housing societies,” a process that marks the so-called urbanization of Dhaka all around its edge.
High-rise housing cluster on stilts (Ashraf with Masudul Islam Shammo, 2010).
There are two sets of questions, one is on the flood-plains: Is building on the flood-plains a contradiction? Does this conspire against the ecological principles embedded in DAP? How to resolve the pressure of building and the ethics of the environment? The other questions involve the edge: What should be the perimeter of the city? What will happen beyond that edge? What will be the relationship between two sides of the divide? Dhaka cannot grow infinitely in every other direction, swallowing up wetlands and agricultural land with mind-numbing speed and greed, and throwing off balance a precious ecological and hydrological system. If not, then, how will be the population growth and the appetite for urban land solved? That is the challenge. The brilliance for urban designers and planners will be to show that sustaining and enhancing Dhaka’s geographic life system can address growth.
The conceptual question is: How does one dwell in an aquatic landscape? How does one inhabit the water? We have to bring a paradigmatic shift to how we see the environment at the edge, which is primarily and fundamentally a liquid landscape. It appears that we do not have the conceptual framework for dealing with such a landscape; the planning designation “land-use” may not be quite appropriate. We might have to coin a new term: “water-use” or “land-water use.” We have to confront the challenge of how “to bring the city into the flood-plain and the flood-plain into the city.”
In such a fluid landscape, the question of “site” has to be revised, as sometimes there is no site in the conventional sense, and “building” may have to happen on water itself. In one prospect for such a situation, a new network may be conceived that is made of cautious and careful development – streets, walkways, housing and public places – that are mostly elevated either on stilts or non-continuous earth mound over agricultural fields, gardens and parks, each at different elevations and responding to different levels of flooding. A new urban morphology is suggested where the porosity at the lower level will allow an unimpeded flow of water at different seasons, and a more or less stable urban form overlaid on that. One edge of Dhaka is defined by a controversial engineering monument: the embankment (the built western edge and the anticipated eastern one). The embankment itself could be the generator of a wholly different building and landscape morphology that makes new matrix for settlements, transportation, use of wetlands and agriculture. Ribbons or clustered development could be conceived at strategic locations along the embankment that will contain primarily high-density housing and commercial spaces (the embankment will double as a transportation corridor). The flood-plains will also be reorganized for designated areas of rice cultivation, elevated fields for perhaps orchards and rose cultivation (that will also be accessible as parks via boat or bridges from the ribbons), and permanent canals for boat-ways.
The embankment itself needs to be re-conceptualized. Instead of being a stark divide that has often compounded than solved problems, the embankment may be deconstructed into a series of interlocked walls, planes and platforms, creating a grid of bounded areas. The result could be a new framework where water from either side – city or river – could be allowed passage in either direction in a controlled way. The gridded spaces controlled by locks and sluice gates will create retention ponds, water reservoirs, water filtration areas, natural parks, or agricultural fields as needed. The new interlocking “walls” could be a platform for creating housing structures over a continuous pedestrian or vehicular movement system.
The flood-plains require a new investigation of the place of agriculture and fishing in relation to urbanism. This involves a more uneasy issue in social and topographical utopia: the possibility of reorganizing scattered homesteads in the flood-plains into clustered and close-knit settlements served by proper infrastructure while dedicating the plains for planned, intense agriculture and fishing in response to the rhythm of flood. This is perhaps the next big challenge for our planners and policy-makers: Can this be a model of settlement and economic production in the future catastrophic scenario of climate change? Notes and References
1. Segments of this article were co-written with Saif Ul Haque, and published at various times in the Daily Star and Forum. The images are drawn from planning and design studies conducted with students at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and Temple University, Philadelphia.
2. The urban population of Bangladesh will be 45% in 2030, up from 10% in 1951 and 25% in 2000, see Ness and Talwar, Asian Urbanization in the New Millennium (Singapore: Marshal Cavendish International, 2005).
3. Of the Bangla terms “nagara” and “shahar,” the former of Sanskrit and the latter of Persian origin, “nagara” relates to a place of buildings and structures, and also describes what is clever and cunning. The “nagarika,” for example, is someone adept in the pursuit of “kama” and “artha.” Suffixes in names like “pur,” as in Gazipur, refers to a fort, while “ganj” to a market. None of these terms suggest the idea of a civic polity, the ethical and spiritual basis of collective living in a modern city.
4. When architect Jaime Lerner took over the Brazilian city of Curitiba as its mayor in the 1970s and 80s, it was afflicted by all the familiar “third world” ills. Lerner changed the living conditions of the city, its ailing economy, the poor transportation system, and the polluted environment, making him quite rightly an urban wizard.
5. Louis Kahn’s Complex at Sherebanglanagar, with the buildings in a setting of lakes, gardens, orchards, and parks, is perhaps the closest modern vision of a “Bengali” city. While the Parliament Building poses a monumental architectural presence, Kahn gave extensive thought to how the various buildings may be grouped in a setting of water and vegetation evoking imageries from the Bengali landscape. One preponderant reflection for him was “how the buildings are to take their place on the land,” that is, in what ways the buildings can be grouped together so that they reveal the qualities of the place. Kahn wanted to heighten the idea that buildings also come together in a particular way in the delta, and that the age-old deltaic practice of “dig-and-mound” could generate a modern interpretation of a hydrological architecture.
6. Many cities of the world are now bypassing the national state in order to forge extra-national linkages with other urban centers around the world through new economic network. For example, readymade garments, textiles, light manufacturing, and computer/information and medical outsourcing can be part of global industries in a far more energetic and productive way. New urban nodes set up as model townships can be designated for a particular purpose complete with work places, training centres, residences, recreational facilities, etc. Some of the nodes can also be set up as experimental, vertical farms and centers of energy production and, as described in the election manifesto of a major political party, as “high-tech park, software technology park, ICT incubator and computer villages.”
7. Hong Kong is a good example where an integrated planning approach has succeeded in maintaining low automobile dependency despite Hong Kong’s high per capita income and population density. The success of Hong Kong’s pedestrianization was possible due to the integrated network of pathways that separate car and pedestrian, and allow those pathways and sidewalks to be spaces of their own.
