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Open spaces are needed for existential reasons
New banks along the canal
A city is never made by buildings alone but by an intricate relationship of buildings and open spaces. Open spaces are thus one of the most important ingredients of a city. Buildings alone never make a city, but buildings and spaces in a well-knit fabric.
The spaces lungs, if you will are wide-ranging, from formal to informal, from large-scale to intimate. South Plaza at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar is such a formal space (alas, nobody can access a plaza anymore!). An informal but teeming with brushing bodies is the space outside Gausia Market. Large spaces include large 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.
How priceless such spaces, more valuable than a building with Tk 3000 per square feet! How ironic that we build and build, we fill up lakes and open fields and build, and then we pay hefty to get a lakeside view (if the splinter of a lake exists)!
Dhaka one time had an enviable resource of enjoyable spaces; now they have either vanished or are vanishing in an avalanche of greed and manipulation. Dhaka was, and is no longer, but again can be a place of light, green, and air.
An immediate and water-tight moratorium should be set on all construction activities in open spaces. And spaces that have been brutally violated should be recovered without mercy.
The city of Dhaka used to be synonymous with trees. Flower-bearing, scent-emanating trees; trees that marked the passing of the seasons. 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. Now we have simply become urban bandits, pillaging and raping all things good about the city. Dhaka could have been a garden city, a city like Philadelphia or Honolulu where the rush to build did not stop the civilised and healthy need for trees and vegetation at every available nook and corner of the city, where buildings could be seen as pavilions in a garden. The climate of Dhaka desires it to be a garden city.
The proper image of a city is given by all those things in public spaces that add up to the total urban visual environment - benches, sculptures, fences, light-posts, fountains, billboards, bus stands, newspaper stands, the whole paraphernalia that falls under "urban art." Every little thing matters.
And being a poor country why shouldn't we be concerned about that? Why should we allow a ramshackle newsstand on the sidewalk? Why should we let a poorly designed fountain pass as urban art?
An Urban Arts Commission formed by members seriously committed to love of Dhaka and who know the art of urbanity should be entrusted to monitor such images for the city.