Kazi Khaleed Ashraf's imagined city
Syed Manzoorul Islam
Can Dhaka be saved? Can it be made livable again, and turned into the green and friendly city it once was? Can its crazy landscape of high-rise ghettos, random shopping centres, festering slums and residential neighbourhoods that have also morphed as business districts and commercial hubs be ever redrawn to reflect a proper urban environment? Or, for that matter, can its decaying public places and decrepit parks overrun by squatters, drug dealers and vendors of various dispositions be ever reclaimed and restored to their primary functions? Or its dysfunctional traffic system given a shot in the arm and made to run the way it runs in cities of comparable size, population or importance?
No one should be surprised if the answer to the above questions is a resounding 'no' – such is the pessimism that Dhaka's urban reality breeds, which even grips city planners and administrators. To be fair to them, they have done their part: their have been many projects and plans to revive the city and give it some semblance of order and coherent environment, but none of these plans even reached the stage of implementation.
Dhaka has long reached the limits of ecology and morphology; it has missed all the buses to modernisation. It is a city in perpetual crisis – it has no zoning law, no public transport system, no solid waste management or pollution control strategies, no density distribution, no properly functioning public utility system, , no neighbourhood parks or playing fields or empty spaces, not much of social security and hardly any provision for open air cultural activities. It is plagued by overcrowding which has been triggered by Dhaka's pre-eminent omniscientrality as successive governments and the corporate sector have placed all their head offices in Dhaka. Dhaka has little respect for its archives. Except for the street lines, most of Dhaka is in a state of flux. It doesn't allow its citizens to nurture memories. It is a city that takes pride in concentration and city centre living; it is paranoid about connecting with peripheries. Dhaka's social ecology is a mess; it hardly inspires a concept of place.
Dhaka has never been able to optimize its size or its population; or zone out its schoolsand other non-residential elements. Dhaka, a riverfront city, has no connection with water. Reclaimed waterbodies fall victim to encroachment and earth filling and eventually disappear.
In a recent survey conducted by the London-based Economist Intelligent unit Dhaka scored poorly in almost all the vital indices that define a livable city. It has a public transport system which is hugely dysfunctional as it solely depends on roads. Its infrastructure facilities are poor; its supply of utilities inadequate and its crime rate alarming. Nothing short of a revolution can save the city and effectively put an end to the contradictions and ambiguities that beset it now. That revolution has to draw a new cognitive map of the city, a visionary design that will inspire policy planners, government functionaries, politicians, activists and private entrepreneurs to put their resources together to halt Dhaka's slide to disaster.
Kazi Khaleed Ashraf's Designing Dhaka: A Manifesto for a Better City which came out in 2012 offers such a stimulating and challenging design for Dhaka. It proposes a manifesto to bring healing to Dhaka, and solve its problems from the bottom up. He calls Dhaka 'a stubborn city,' 'a city of brutal facts' balancing itself unsteadily on six different morphologies that define its urban fabric: the settlement along the Buriganga; the colonial spread of the city carving out a 'new Dhaka,' the post-1947 development of the city including its planned residential areas, the chaotic and unplanned growth of a jumble of infrastructure that stifled the planned city and the ubiquitous squatter colonies and slums define the city and give it its uniqueness. He picks up the essential properties of each morphology—which he sees as both a reality as well as a promise-- and collates them for an understanding of their essential character. What they have in common is a socio-spatial dialectic – more than physical structures – that should not be lost sight of in planning for cohesion and transcendence. 'A new Dhaka is possible,' he writes; 'It can truly be a modern city that is socially, economically and ecologically sustainable.' And then explains his grounds of optimism. 'Working with its geography and hydrology, and its growing urban needs,' he maintains, 'Dhaka can still be a very unique, green and highly livable city.'
Such an assumption rests on unsure grounds if it is not supported by two essential qualities of a city designer – 'daring' and 'vision.' Ashraf has both. In the subsequent pages of the book he explains what 'daring' implies and what design can do if it assumes a visionary dimension.
Designing Dhaka has a theory part and an action part. The theory part deals with an understanding of spatial ontology, the heterogeneous spaces and their relations, and explains the reasons behind Dhaka's cataclysmic urban growth. It also defines the city in civilizational terms, explaining how Dhaka, like all comparable cities, has become over the centuries 'an instrument of destiny.' Ashraf maintains that a city like Dhaka is an 'aggregate of economic and technical vectors' that policy makers and planners should take into account, but it is 'lived experience' that should take precedence. He indeed builds on the lived experience to formulate his vision. This is one reason why history is so important to him. In course of his journey through the history of the city he discovers when and where the feeling of place and civitas – civic enterprise – was lost and can be regained.
Another strong point Ashraf makes is that any design for Dhaka has to base itself on 'a liquid landscape' and how the plan has to be around land and water, without putting them in an antagonistic position.
The theory part of Designing Dhaka lays the ground of what cultural geographers describe as a 'critical-mass potential for innovation' and looks at space as culturally constructed instead of being a given. For a space-starved city like Dhaka, space has to be both material and representational. It has to be a triad of historicality, sociality and spatiality that constitutes human being. The theory part also alerts us to the need of emphasizing more on practices, strategies and interactions rather than on systems and structures.
The action part of Designing Dhaka begins with a 15 point manifesto for making a new Dhaka possible. Briefly stated, these are: urbanism, hydrology, peripheries, the city as an island, containing the city, mobility, housing, open spaces, pedestrian friendly streets, city governance, urban assets, new economy, energy and ecology, catalytic architecture and city of play. Each point is explained and supported by a wealth of information and a doable agenda. In planning the city, Ashraf maintains, urbanism, rather than urbanisation should be the focus, since 'urbanism is a visualisation of the soul of the city.' What he emphasizes is an evolutionary philosophy, a 'meditation on totality' which would take into account the past, the present and the future. If such a holistic approach is taken and sustained, it would be possible for designers to understand the essential chemistry of land and water and combine them to create a fluid city. A holistic approach should also take the designers from the core of the city to the edge in order to make a polycentric Dhaka and enclose the river within its living parameters.
Kazi Khaleed Ashraf's manifesto looks at Dhaka as a site where an urban revolution is possible. As architect Saif Ul Haque, another crusader for a new and better Dhaka, remarks in his prologue, 'All the tasks listed above are not of very complex nature, neither are they very difficult to implement but the question is how much are we willing to do it?' He then asks, 'And when do we begin?'
The right answer is: 'Yesterday'.