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What Dhaka is
Dhaka is not a city, yet, and here are the reasons why: Population density and physical growth do not make a civic organism. Neither do swanky cars and sparkling malls. What is touted as “growth” of Dhaka is actually the pillaging of the city in the name of progress and development. Dhaka is a city without civic commitment, neither from the city “fathers” nor, sadly, from most of its citizens. Dhaka has no cohesive plan and proceeds only with bursts of ad-hoc decisions. 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 how people should live (houses and housing). Being in the top ten populous cities of the world, and one of the most densely inhabited places on earth, which Dhaka is, is not an accolade but a possible passage towards an ecological and social cataclysm. Unless that is stemmed by desire and design.
From what was truly a garden city on water, Dhaka now faces a certain civic and environmental deterioration. 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 ineptitude is pushing the city towards a calamitous future. The added tragedy in Dhaka is that its planning institution is fragmented and unimaginative. For decades, hidebound bureaucracies have stunted the creativity needed to plan effectively for Dhaka. With failures in urban planning and management, development in the last twenty years or so have fallen largely to private interests, which often act without regard to natural resources, urban context, or larger 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 undo a city by building it.
Dhaka also remains an isolated city. Despite the seeming signs of a global arrival, Dhaka remains removed from participating on equal footing in a universal civilisation. Except for certain business exchanges there are no interactive global cross-currents that touch upon Dhaka. No city can flourish today as an urban culture by being introverted.
On the other hand, Dhaka is the sole urban model for the country. In the absence of a solid tradition of a civic urban culture, Dhaka remains, ironically, the image of the city par excellence. Every small town, every nook and corner in the mufassil wishes to mimic a city that is largely dysfunctional when each of those places could develop along its own tradition. Imagine the country with hundred such Dhakas.
