A city of 22 million people with three stoplights; Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, officially actually has 72 such traffic regulators. However, my hosts at Volumezero, a local architecture firm, assured me that only three were operational. During my eight-day tour, I encountered just two functioning lights.
Traffic flows with the sluggishness of mud, accompanied by incessant honking and a logic incomprehensible to outsiders. This minimal infrastructure highlighted a form of urbanism that challenged my preconceptions about city life.
Herewith, a few impressions from the trip, with an advisory that they are only that, buttressed by conversations, research, and the knowledge of my former research assistant Afrida Afroz Rahman, currently a Professor there at the University of Asia Pacific (UAP) in Dhaka.
Dhaka's history stretches back over a millennium, yet it feels remarkably youthful. This vitality is evident not just demographically but economically as well. Since Bangladesh gained independence in 1971, the city has been in the midst of a spectacular boom. Everywhere there is construction, both within the city boundaries and on its edges, exacerbating congestion and the air pollution. All of that new building also means that there is a sense of there being little sense of history or tradition on view. As Dhaka was a minor provincial city before it became a national capital, there are very few grand monuments, whether from the Mughal period during which it experienced its first growth or from the age of English rule, the so-called Raj. It does have one notable civic monument: the National Parliament or Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, designed by Louis Kahn and completed in 1977 and dedicated in 1982. However, the current nominally elected government has fenced off the considerable area that contains the deliberative hall, the offices, and the apartments for the parliamentarians, supposedly for security concerns, and the whole thus is more of a void in the urban fabric than a focal point.
Moreover, Kahn’s work there, which also includes a women’s hospital, appears divorced from any particular traditions and more connected to the architect’s obsessions with brick, towers, arches, and circles. What Kahn did produce, however, is a dominant local style for modernism. Almost all the good architecture produced since Bangladesh’s independence, with the exception of generic commercial structures, is an attempt to build on Kahn’s inventions. Though these were supposedly rooted in craft traditions and the riverine nature of the geography (Dhaka occupies a position akin to New Orleans, Alexandria, or Rotterdam as the main city in the largest delta in the world, that of the Ganges), those connections are hard to find. The work is also quite similar to what Kahn did in other parts of the subcontinent, most notably the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. What has happened instead is that architects, starting with Kahn’s collaborator Muzharul Islam, have developed a palette of concrete frames filled in with brick screens and developed into deep, layered, and shade-giving spaces out of those ingredients that is appropriate for both the building methods there, while at the same time giving Dhaka a hint of an emergent vernacular. That was, for me at least, the first oddity I encountered as somebody obsessed with architecture: a modernism based almost completely on the work of one foreign architect, without any clear local roots, that has managed to blossom into a successful style or approach.
The second realization my quick trip gave me is that the character of what has not been designed in such a high style is so without hierarchy as to defy many of my other expectations. There are a few high-rises, with a few more on the way, but the military and airport officials have until recently restricted anything above twenty stories in Dhaka’s core. Because of economic pressures, there are, on the other side of the scale spectrum, only a few low-rise structures remaining. That means that in most of Dhaka the street scene is in the range of six to nineteen stories. As the structures are also grouped very closely together with very little open space, you get the sense that this, the most densely populated city in the world, is a human-made massif through which you have to wind. There are almost no landmarks, whether human-made or natural, that give you a sense of direction or code the different areas.
The third phenomenon I noticed in Dhaka was the lack of care for public space. The government on every level seems to completely ignore streets, parks, and even university campuses. I was told that for beautiful public space I would need to go to the so-called “cantonments:” walled-off military enclaves maintained by the various branches of the army for their current and former members and their family, which are obviously off-limits to everybody else (and that form another local phenomenon, but one I was not able to experience). The only more-or-less well-maintained open spaces where the religious compounds around mosques and schools. This lack of care for public space is something you can observe in other parts of the Indian subcontinent, but the other cities I have visited there had more public ceremonial spaces that were accessible and well-tended. Is clear and clean public space needed? People gathered on streets and in the messy park, with no apparent call for better amenities.
The fourth aspect of Dhaka that surprised me was the lack of the kind of expressive signage, supported by commercial structures that at street level and above are open containers for bars, restaurants, and stores, of the kind you would find in a place such as, for instance, Bangkok. In that sense, Dhaka is again more like other cities on the Indian subcontinent. There is little electronic expressionism here, which only supports the impression of a city built up as a monolith of concrete structures filled in tightly so as to contain whatever activity is inside. Modernity here is as recessive as the older structures.
Finally, all of these elements come together into a form that is to an outsider even more confusing because of the lack of recognizable pattern or form. As in many Asian cities, Dhaka turns away from the Buriganga river that birthed it, expect for a wharf area where boats connect the capital to cities up and down the stream. Dhaka has few monumental boulevards, squares, or circles, making it difficult to figure out where one is. A flyover highway system, of which only two significant parts are built, further divorces you from the city. Dhaka is in the process creating a subway system, but for now there are no stations of the kind that help identify different neighborhoods. What parks there are hug those creeks, streams, and ponds dotted around the city that have managed to survive, and they act as interruptions, rather than as anchors for neighborhoods.
The lack of a readable order I experienced is being continued in the new developments under construction, recently finished, or planned around the central core. Though they are gridded, they again not only have very few, if any, monumental focal points, but, as the grids are being developed by different private entrepreneurs, there is little continuity from one area to the other.
All of this means that Dhaka remains, even after my immersion, discussions, and some study of its history and form, enigmatic for me. In Mumbai, you can orient yourself according to the old downtown core and the ocean. In Bangkok, the temple compounds, but also the huge shopping malls, provide that sense of where you are. In China, the government decrees monuments and encourages development in huge blocks. In Dhaka, I felt continually adrift. Perhaps the closest I came to understanding the city was as a human-made equivalent of a delta of meandering flows, immersive and off one scale.
The question then is how the city could or should develop. Certainly good firms such as Volumezero or the small atelier headed by Marina Tabassum are producing structures at a small scale that is perfecting a Kahnian modernism, but none of them are working on either public commissions or urban plans.
With little public opposition, the government has no incentive to provide the kind of public provisions you would expect in such a large capital city. The pressures for development are only towards more density, not order or differentiation. Such a confluence of forces are present in many other cities, but I have never experienced what I would call a continual implosion of urban density anywhere else. Can implosion be a generator for urban form? Will it be any good? I look forward to returning to Dhaka to see those forces produce an urbanism unlike anywhere else.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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