Dhaka — The Perils And Promises Of An Asian Megacity

There is no single vantage to narrate the urban story of Dhaka. Like other emerging megacities (according to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, megacities are “urban agglomerations” with more than 10 million people) of the world, Dhaka has been growing exponentially, particularly since it became the capital of the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971 (see Fig. 17.1). This urban growth transpired with both promises and perils, introducing contentious debates not only on urbanization, but also on questions of modernity and progress. If modernity is, as Marshall Berman articulated, “a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity [that] pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal,” Dhaka city appears to be a quintessential modernist narrative in which optimism and pessimism, resilience and dysfunction, the spaces of affluence and poverty could not find a more fluid coexistence (Berman, 1982). Marx’s observation that in a modern world “all that is solid melts into air” — that is, forces of global capitalism and market leave everything in a perpetual state of transience — presents a prescient portrayal of contemporary Dhaka…