A city can never be fully known other than through the narratives and representations it suffers. We know this from Italo Calvino, and also Orhan Pamuk and Roland Barthes. This representational quandary is perhaps most true of Dhaka. Dhaka has quite a few predominant narratives none is flattering.
With its extreme challenges and vulnerabilities, Dhaka represents a particular type in Asia’s urbanism, but something that is still in the fringe of the broad discourse. Dhaka’s particularity may present not only a new set of descriptions but the possibility of a new conversation around the future of cities.
In fact, I would go a step further and recall Rem Koolhaas’s declaration for Atlanta. In an attempt to wean focus away from the usual discourse on the city based on classical European models, Koolhaas urged: “Leave Paris and Amsterdam – go look at Atlanta, quickly and without preconceptions…” (1989).
I would rephrase that and say: Leave Paris and Amsterdam – go look at Dhaka, closely and without preconceptions, for Dhaka presents not simply a catastrophe for the usual reasons of urbanization but a new theorem for city-thinking.
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There has been a quantum leap in the urban phenomenon of Asia. Ushered by economic and climate migration, and administrative impetus, more people now live in cities.
A new city conglomerate is emerging in the landscapes of Asia whose contours remain unmapped and whose nature is close to being explosive. And this is not easy for architects trained in conventional methods. Powerless to comprehend the scope of the new urban landscape, and unable to figure out a point of entry into the enigma, architects are content in their allocated lots and plots to be ironic or phantasmagoric. Where once architecture and the city formed a twinness, the parameters of one informing the other, there is now a contention. While architects make stunning architecture, the city goes to hell.
Liberal economy, private investments, and burgeoning consumer markets have ushered both new opportunities and unprecedented challenges. With the state receding from its usual role of directing urban and architectural arrangements, a new axis of power constituted by an often invisible consortium of developers, industrialists and politicians control the most expensive real estate lot in the country – Dhaka city. But this comes without a clear urban vision and commitment of well-being for everyone. The new middle-class of Dhaka, those at the forefront of the economic dynamic, encouraged by commodity culture and transnational options, are no longer averse to displaying flamboyance unlike the ethic of austerity practiced by an earlier middle-class. Resplendent malls, upscale housings and villas, and glittering offices decode second modernity into an architecture of excess and exclusion. A liberal economy also comes with its social consequences of disparity in income and allocation of resources. Architecture, by naturally aligning with the emergent axis, becomes a collaborator in this process, and beings to show the rift in the social matrix in physically tangible ways.
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All cities are the same, and each city is different. This is particularly true of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that displays all the dysfunctional syndromes of a topsy-turvy Asian city undergoing spasms of demographic and economic growths.
From the deluge of the late 1980s when two-third of the city went under water (including my parents’ house) to the unforgettable tragedy of the Rana Plaza factory in which a garments factory building collapsed killing 2000 workers, one calamity seems to follow another. With Rana Plaza as an emblem, Dhaka can be easily written off as an evidence of an apocalyptic city-site. Such is the landscape of an unruly industrial globalization.
Death in the Plaza, as I called it in a newspaper column, is a consequence of Dhaka’s irresponsible planning, a result of an abysmal failure by city fathers to establish what should be built where and how. All around the city, in a largely aquatic landscape, sand and debris cover once fields of mustard and rice, and concrete and steel rods replace the vernacular of bamboo and thatch. Multi-storied buildings hum with the music of a far-off Gap or Walmart. Freshly laid sand-beds announce the arrival of an upcoming housing society.
The transformation of Dhaka and its watery regions, along with its physical and social landscape, has been relentless and brutal. Basically: When an agricultural landscape at the fringe of the city rapidly transforms into a hodge-podge urbanization, strange things will happen. Nalas, dobas and pukurs – the lowlands – will get filled to shore up tottering towers, without any basic recourse to safety and buildability, and petit goons with the blessings of political leaders will become millionaires, and enter the mystical chain of globalization.
People in Bangladesh have lived in the delta – the Bengal delta – for centuries, and have learned to live with the extremism of nature that has tested their mettle, creativity and fortitude. Dwellers of the delta, however, do not know how to live with collapsing and burning buildings. They do not have any collective memory or folk knowledge of such things. This is the dark side of urban development, the conundrum of magical economic growth and consumer capitalism centered on primate cities erected with a geographic arrogance.
On the other hand, Dhaka is an immensely vibrant city. The traffic condition may be hellish, water may clog up road arteries, and buildings may collapse without warning, but Dhaka is positioned to be one of the most economically dynamic cities in Asia. For the year 2025, UK Economic Outlook, Dhaka is ranked at 44 among 150 nations with USD215 bn., way above Brasilia, Rome, Karachi and Montreal.
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What distinguishes Dhaka from most other Asian cities in similar growth outbursts is its geography, or rather hydro-geography. With a deeply intertwined – now troubled – relationship with a landscape constructed by powerful rivers, epic floods, silting and land-shifting of monumental proportions, Dhaka’s urbanism calls for a different song, a different measure.
Couple of years ago, I wrote a piece in response to an invitation by Kongjian Yu for a Chinese journal. With a title “Themes for an Aqueous City,” I summarized the condition of Dhaka in the following way:
“A hydro-geographical landscape calls for a different measure in design thinking and practice. Considering that an aqueous urbanism entails an epistemic shift, this article locates the city of Dhaka as a point of departure for such a thinking. What distinguishes Dhaka from other cities in similar growth outbursts is its deeply intertwined relationship with a landscape constructed/molded by powerful rivers, epic floods, silting and land-shifting of monumental proportions. In that fluctuating hydrological world of the delta, cities and settlements have been structured by the dynamics of rivers, canals, wetlands, floodplains, agricultural fields, chars (silted landforms) and human habitation. Such a deltaic milieu calls attention for imagining an aqueous urbanism, and even a new water ethos in contemporary design discourse. Such a hydraulic vision for cities has to begin from the edge of the precious landscape of wetlands and agricultural terrain, urging for a conception that integrates urbanism, agriculture, and flood terrains.”
A routine request from the editor for a set of key words for the article set me thinking of a new contour of the city: “Hydro-geographical landscape,” “riverbank ecology,” “wet design,” “aquatic city.” I thought these set off a totally different measures for a city.
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Dhaka was a deltaic city where water in the form of rivers, canals, waterways, ponds and flood plains formed its quasi-urban matrix [I emphasize the past tense]. This is not simply an image of a picturesque landscape, but of an aquatic terrain that implied communication, drainage, economic life, festivity, rituals, and a way of life. The neighborhood of Dhaka’s landscape is literally braided within the hydro-geography of the delta. While core Dhaka is changing, a ten-minute ride outside Dhaka still shows the aquatic reality of the land – flood plains, wetlands, and agricultural fields completely girdle the city. But too few planners, far less city fathers, and even the people of the city recognize that Dhaka is a tender land-mass, virtually an island framed by three rivers and a fluid landscape – conditions of the delta.
From the heart of the present city, Dhaka and the delta appear as two separate entities, antithetical and stranger to each other. In the horizon of the contemporary city, the delta does not even appear in the consciousness until a deluge comes, with clockwork, seasonally and unmistakably.
Since the 1950s, a different and disruptive ethos has prevailed in the organization of cities in the delta. Landfills, embankments and roadways have supported the technology of a dry culture, pitting the city against the hydraulic system. Much of the current crises of Dhaka – lack of land, shortage of housing, erosion of civic spaces – stem from this opposition, the inability to incorporate the language of a dynamic aquatic landscape into planning mechanisms and policies. Planners and policy-makers glorify land, while water is exiled to the domain of poets, vagrants, and pitiful margins of the city. Indeed, what is wet is seen as a sign of backwardness and archaic practices.
In the ideological confrontation of dry versus wet, a dry regime in planning has not only obscured immersive world-views but also enforced a kind of limited and limiting measure on the otherwise prodigious and unruly landscape of the delta. How to find a contemporary structure or measure of a hydraulic landscape or fluid cosmology? A different narrative, as well as new measures, ought to begin with a summary phenomenology of water.
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A deltaic milieu calls for new measures of water, and even a new water ethos in contemporary design discourse, even though that has been in place in impromptu and vernacular practices for centuries. How and what to learn from such vernacular practices of a water ethos?
In the heart of the delta, the householder knows how to build a house on a mound next to a pond, a farmer knows when to plant his crop of mustard or eggplant, what variety of rice paddy at the onset of the monsoon, what when the water is receding, the farmer knows how to become a fisherman when the water does not recede, and the villager knows “the river is now an empty vessel, and they cannot cast their nets.”
Sumet Jumsai, the Thai architect and architectural anthropologist, in his book Naga: Cultural Origins in Siam and the West Pacific (1990), attempts a new measure of the deep structure of aquatically charged landscapes. Jumsai also recalls Buckminister Fuller’s notion of “nautical reflex” in understanding the aquatic ethos of peoples in the Pacific rim of Asia. At another scale, at the landscape and urban one, landscape architect and scholars provide a new understanding of the Mekong Delta. Looking back at a complex like Angkor Wat, we now know it is not simply an architectural complex but an irrigational system as part of a systematic agricultural practice.
For some of us, the first task seems to be about an epistemic shift: How to articulate a phenomenology of water as a premise for new city thinking? I cite few pre-conditions in that understanding:
Water creates a paradox, water is a paradox. There is too much water, and there is too little water. Water purifies, and water needs to be purified. Social thinker and philosopher Ivan Illich makes a critical observation that once water was needed to purify everything, and now water needs to be purified before anything can begin. Illich makes it evident that H2O and water have now become opposites. In this technocratically induced paradox, aesthetics, hygiene and pragmatics supersede the phenomenological depth of water.
Water disorients and reorients. Water is an agent of transformation, of fluctuations and inversions, and with that shift, usherer of ambiguity and reversibility. In Jose Saramago’s novel Stone Raft, a fictional account of the rupture of the Iberian peninsula from the European continent and its floating away towards the Americas highlights the instability of the geographic given and ensuing social chaos. What seems evident is that the entry of water in the everyday dry domain can disrupt normativity, and produce new social and political realities.
Water refigures architectural ontology. Such a condition is presented as a fundamental architectural dilemma during the turbulent deluges that visit Bangladesh every other year. In extreme situations, people in affected areas, climb up on the roof of their thatch huts with cattle, poultry and other belongings. As poignant as it is, the situation is a reminder of something primordial and ontological – search for a platform as the most fundamental architectural necessity. Water disrupts this fundamental givenness – the platform upon which life takes place and unfolds. Following such a disruption to the fundamental baseline, the task of seeking a level ground becomes a singular motivation.
Water assures neither terra nor firma. The reversibility induced by water disrupts an easy equation between water and ground, typically considered as antithetical. The term “ground” continues to privilege terra firma as the unquestioned basis of our life-world. Water not only challenges but also disrupts taking for granted that land is ground. In a new constitution of water/ground, where land coordinates or the firma of terra has been unsettled, one can think of three scenarios: Water versus ground, Water as ground, and Water is ground (a liquefied form).
Consequently, it is also necessary to develop a language of aquatic phenomena (on hindsight, these should have been the keywords in the article for the Chinese journal): Immersion. Buoyancy. Drift. Level. Depth. Fluidity. Flotation. Ebb. Tide. Rhythm.
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The most emblematic condition of the deltaic geography is the char, land formation produced by the dynamics of soil-shifts and water flows. Water cascading down from upland mountains brings pulverized remains to the flat flood-plains in the form of sand, silt and mud, depositing them in an unpredictable geometry of land-forms and waterways. In this complex, concatenated topography of land and water, delicate chars appear one year to disappear the next, while more or less stabilized ones become sites of settlement and habitation.
A char is formed land-mass, a reminder of an earlier turn of a river and deposition of silt to form the new land-mass, demonstrating a geo-hydrological process in action. The char eventually offers a rich, arable land upon which grows a spontaneous settlement integrating habitation and occupation. Here is a natural and social process in action through a landscape agency, a landscape design by nature. Dhaka’s near and far fringes are traces of chars.
Chars pose a conceptual challenge to the imagination of landscape norms. They bear unsettling questions to what is site, what is fixity, and therefore what is architecture. If buildings fundamentally suggest fixity and stability, chars provoke a new thinking on the relation between architecture and landscape, and eventually city and landsacpe.
Riverbanks and thus the flux of rivers also acquire a deeply sociological intensity in this milieu. Chars, lowlands and riverbank ecology continue to populate popular narratives, from folk culture to modern literature. The vast matrix of the delta, typically “rural,” has adopted techniques and practices for dwelling in that landscape. Embracing water and wetness is a a natural consequence of this delta milieu.
But of the city? In its position as a fortress of dryness, the city has not cooperated with the delta. Can the phenomenon of chars be generative of a hydraulic city? How can a city be conceived through a fluid dynamics?
Louis Kahn intuitively recognized the water dynamic when he designed the National Capital Complex in Dhaka in the early 1960s. Water became and remained a powerful compositional thematic in the design of the Complex, the whole layout seen as a metaphor for a delta topography. Buildings rise from the ground like ancient mesas while a lake girdles and links these formations like a primordial landscape. While much of the gestures may be symbolic in nature, Kahn was able to extract a new language out of the liquid origin of the place.
People who dwell in the core of Dhaka city, walk its streets and live its dry conditionings may not be aware of it, but current urban development practices are based, literally, on liquid matter. Present Dhaka is being built from the fluid fabric of its surrounds by piping and pumping soil and sand. In Dhaka’s furious expansion from its relatively higher grounds into the precious region of floodplains, wetlands and “lowlands,” vast aquatic areas are being furiously filled up by a powerful coterie of developers in an unprecedented scale of urbanistic intervention. Hence, Rana Plaza.
Every hour, barges on various rivers and rivulets ringing and networking Dhaka carry sand and soil from one location to deposit on another – typically, a “lowland.” In another method, an array of steel pipes, sometimes miles long, pump sand and silt from a river location onto a landfill site. Such filled lands, marked for dry development, are eventually parceled off as building lots on which rise the phalanx of dreary, boxed apartments.
It is precisely at this juncture, where the expansion of the city meets an aquatic matrix, a new kind of city-thinking is needed: an imagination for an aqueous urbanism.
An aqueous urbanism thus requires an epistemic shift. The norm of thinking about Dhaka has been to privilege the core but that has to be reversed. An hydraulic vision for Dhaka has to begin from the edge of the precious landscape of wetlands and agricultural terrain, ushering a conception of a city that integrates urbanism, agriculture, and flood zone.
In such a fluctuating landscape where the edge between land and water, between settlement and landscape is often blurred, questions of urbanism must begin with: What should be the perimeter of the city? What will happen at that edge? How will the two sides of this fluid edge be planned? Dhaka cannot grow infinitely in every other direction, swallowing up wetlands and agricultural land with mind-numbing speed, 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.
By engaging with the above realizations, Dhaka can become a theorem for a liquid urbanism, a design laboratory for a water-structured urban ecology instead of being a poster-child of urban cataclysm. In such a schema, water structures the city and urban infrastructure in which hydrological issues serve as starting point and framework for future urban planning and design interventions.
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A provisional manifesto for such an urbanism may yield the following approaches:
A platform in the delta. In a landscape of perpetual flux, finding a language for platforms – a horizontal datum – is fundamental.
Fluid dynamic. Form does follow flow in the dynamic of the floodplain where horizontal and vertical movements of water organizes and directs architectural and landscape formations.
Porosities. Crossings, overflows and perforations thus become standard conditions in the topography. An organized matrix of mounds and canals may create a new topographical and urban formation as an alternative to the troublesome practice of landfilling.
An embankment ecology. Embankments and polders seem to coincide with hydraulic landscapes but are they a proper answer.
Following a series of devastating floods in the 1980s, Dhaka is now defined by embankments, a circular barrier and transport infrastructure that physically defines wet and dry. Instead of a sharp delineation, the embankment may be conceived as a fractured formation. It can be undulating or porous, multi-leveled or layered. The critical thing is to allow the passage of water. What that means is a redefinition of the embankment as an edge. Controlled fractures and openings may allow flow of water from both sides in response to wetlands, reservoirs, retention ponds, and agricultural parks.
Elevated System. With the intention of bringing “the city into the flood-plain and the flood-plain into the city,” a network 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 may be proposed.
Where there is water, floatation is not far away. In a terrain of constant water, floating decks and buildings are a natural response.
People in the delta have developed responses through boat-houses, floating markets, floating vegetable gardens and other buoyant devices. Floating gardens and markets continue in practice. Floating schools and hospitals are successful ventures of many recent community-driven projects.
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It seems clear that there is a spatial site for this aquatic conflagration: the edge of the conventional city. The biggest challenge in the recomposition of Dhaka lies in engaging its landscape reality – the dynamic hydrology of the delta. With an ever expanding city, the dynamic also involves a logos of the edge.
Rem Koolhaas, on another occasion, addresses the notion of the “edge” in his cartography of the contemporary city. But where he meant the fringes of the Euro-American city defined by a frazzled fabric of the post-industrial condition or the tattered terrain of suburbia, a place like Dhaka confronts the edge as the new “center.”
Most urban planners and policy-makers focus on the core city. Even when they are dealing with the edge, they see it in the image of the core. Official planning is unable to conceptualize this edge as its own ecology. Without that realization it is easy to participate in the destruction of the city’s hydro-geographical landscape. We think: an audacious vision for Dhaka has to begin from the edge in which the norm of planning of privileging the core has to be reversed.
The geography of the edge is determined by the built-city marching up to meet the “non-urban,” a magnificent but precious terrain of land-water mass made of wetlands, flood-plains, canals, and agricultural fields. The edge is where the dry meets the wet, the “developed” meets the “primitive,” and infrastructure meets the structure-less. This is also where the urbanite meets the farmer, the land grabber discovers his opportunity, and the uprooted often makes her habitation. Site/s of the biggest battle in the city, the terrain of the edge is determined by the presence and flux of water. No planning scheme will work for Dhaka if this simple equation is not recognized. It is a battle because it is in that terrain the instruments of landfill and embankments are in play.
Nothing short of imagining a new landscape of city-form will offer a salvation for Dhaka. The edge conditions of Dhaka presents the possibility of re-negotiating the social and economic, as well conceptual, separation between city and its conventional anti-thesis, whether the village or agricultural plains. The edge is where new forms of space organization in response to an oscillating landscape will have to be reorganized, along with newer types of economic and social opportunities. In the meeting of an older form of the city with agricultural land-form and hydrological landscape, a new conception of a city will have to be developed that integrates (conventional) urbanism, agriculture, infrastructure and flood dynamics.