Starting the process of urban revival
Saturday, 26 December 2009
What is the total number of residents of Dhaka city ? Nobody knows for sure and guess estimates are that the same may be between 13 and 15 million. Dhaka has been growing like wild weeds since the independence of the country. It keeps on regularly attracting people in hordes from all over the country, creating congestion and squalor as most of the new migrants to the city possess hardly the means to access even basic utilities which are in short supply. The result is the spread of slums. Dhaka today is like a vast city of slums with patches of its affluent sections. From water supply to power, everywhere the crisis of demand trailing need is transparent. The city's traffic movement is too inefficient and gridlocks are found to be too frequent and in too many places all the time. The city's drainage system is found to be deplorable in many of its parts in the wet season. Its air pollution and noise pollution rank among the highest in the world. There is hardly any zoning between the residential quarters and the industrial areas. Manufacturing activities have made deep inroads into many areas reserved as residential ones. Intrusion of commercial activities have turned life and living miserable even in previous posh residential areas like Dhanmondi. On the whole, Dhaka is seen to be growing absolutely recklessly facing least regulations to make that growth a planned one. The cumulative effects of all these and other developments have turned Dhaka, a quaint and very much livable city of the provincial type in the fifties and sixties, into a very chaotic and stressed entity in all respects where the quality of life has deteriorated to a very great extent.
The above ills that afflict the capital city of Bangladesh were discussed with grave concern at a roundtable organized recently by the Dhaka Reporters Unity, Dhaka Nagorik and Bangladesh Paribesh Andolan. The participants in it described the various sides to the gradual breakdown of salubrious conditions in the city. But the two most important factors they stressed were that Dhaka's growth and reorganization would need to be immediately brought under a planned framework enforced with rigour and that the plans must be integrated to contribute to the overall sustainable improvement in the conditions of the city.
The suggestions could not be any more timely. For the time to act and act decisively to regenerate Dhaka was crossed long ago. But with the launching of immediate corrective actions, it should be possible to stop the city from heading towards the brink and start a process of its renewal or revival. This is possible provided there is enough political or governmental resolve and vision to work towards this end. According to the pessimists, conditions in Dhaka city are incapable of a reversal. But this view is not tenable. Wherever the problems of the city were sought to be addressed with real determination, the same have yielded positive results in varying degrees. Thus, there is no reason to feel defeated and dejected from a feeling that Dhaka's problems are not capable of solution. Other Asian cities like Bangkok have faced similar great difficulties in areas ranging from managing traffic movement to stopping the proliferation of slums. But planned actions taken by governmental authorities in those countries led, first, to putting a brake on the process of decline followed by a gradual process of regeneration. Dhaka needs to work its way out to such a state with planned and uncompromising actions over a period of time.
The above ills that afflict the capital city of Bangladesh were discussed with grave concern at a roundtable organized recently by the Dhaka Reporters Unity, Dhaka Nagorik and Bangladesh Paribesh Andolan. The participants in it described the various sides to the gradual breakdown of salubrious conditions in the city. But the two most important factors they stressed were that Dhaka's growth and reorganization would need to be immediately brought under a planned framework enforced with rigour and that the plans must be integrated to contribute to the overall sustainable improvement in the conditions of the city.
The suggestions could not be any more timely. For the time to act and act decisively to regenerate Dhaka was crossed long ago. But with the launching of immediate corrective actions, it should be possible to stop the city from heading towards the brink and start a process of its renewal or revival. This is possible provided there is enough political or governmental resolve and vision to work towards this end. According to the pessimists, conditions in Dhaka city are incapable of a reversal. But this view is not tenable. Wherever the problems of the city were sought to be addressed with real determination, the same have yielded positive results in varying degrees. Thus, there is no reason to feel defeated and dejected from a feeling that Dhaka's problems are not capable of solution. Other Asian cities like Bangkok have faced similar great difficulties in areas ranging from managing traffic movement to stopping the proliferation of slums. But planned actions taken by governmental authorities in those countries led, first, to putting a brake on the process of decline followed by a gradual process of regeneration. Dhaka needs to work its way out to such a state with planned and uncompromising actions over a period of time.