Adnan Zillur Morshed

A resilient and adjustable urban development policy for mid-sized cities is necessary to decentralise Dhaka.

The streets of rural Bangladesh should value the safety and wellbeing of its users.

Ever since the 1980s-90s, our typical perception of a rural village has been changing.

The traditional mental image of rural Bangladesh that we have is no longer a reality.

The exhibition can serve as a potent reminder for our ethical responsibility to preserve the mid-century buildings that tell our stories.

The notoriety of Dhaka’s traffic is now daily news. Civil society members have been venting frustration about this maddening crisis.

Recently, on a wintry afternoon, I went to see the Padma Bridge.

It was Titian Matin’s first return to his native Bangladesh after he won the Nobel Prize in economics for his study of the reciprocal relationship between urban density and economic geography.

Imprisoned in various torture chambers by the Pakistan Army during Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971, Mohiuddin Ahmed, MP, wrote numerous letters to his wife, describing the systemic cruelties of his oppressors.

Going around in Dhaka could be overwhelming. The city seems overburdened with the impossible weight of people, buildings, vehicles, rickshaws, noise, carbon emission, and nonstop activities.

Mary Frances Dunham (MFD) arrived in Dhaka on a wintry day in November of 1960. From the window of her room at Hotel Shahbagh, she found ample opportunities to observe the city.

In recent years, the idea of “decolonising knowledge” (DK)—that knowledge creation must be liberated from West-centric and racialised views of the world—has become a bottom-up intellectual movement in Western academia.

For quite some time now, people have been discussing if there are more on-the-ground, inclusive ways to measure a country’s progress, rather than supra-quantitative metrics like GDP.

It is impossible these days to not notice Chattogram’s spectacular urban decline. Go around the port city and you will only experience a place plagued by anemia, chaos, a collective greed to commercialise every open space, and overall, a curious lack of aspiration.

Eight years ago, in May, a large crowd staged a sit-in at Gezi Park, next to Taksim Square, Istanbul’s bustling public plaza in the downtown of its European side.

Land is the closest thing that we know. We cultivate it, build on it, transform it to meet our needs, commercialise it to maximise economic gain, and derive our identities from its widely varying geographic characters.

That gross domestic product (GDP) is not a fully satisfying measure of a country’s progress is no longer news. The awareness of GDP’s inadequacies in revealing a nation’s state of development is now almost mainstream.

How do cities like Dhaka in the throes of frenzied development deal with memories and literary depictions in the process of their transformations?

At the heart of the ongoing debate on the potential demolition of TSC and Kamalapur Railway Station in Dhaka is an old philosophical dilemma—how to progress while retaining some loyalty to history, a key concern of many 20th century philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur.

I do not know how to respond to this barrage of apocalyptic news from Dhaka.