Many Dhakas

An old Dhaka neighbourhood. PHOTO: Syed Zakir Hossain

Six morphologies define the urban organism that is Dhaka, each representing a certain social, economic, and environmental destiny (there are perhaps more than six, but for now that is enough). The term morphology implies the essential form and structure of an organism, as used in biology, that also reveals some of its functional and vital makeup. An urban morphology represents the interrelated composition of a part or whole of a city created by a definitive pattern of buildings and spaces. The buildings, generally residential units, provide a basic typology -- literally the building block of the morphology -- despite what apparently seems like immense variations. In other words, it is housing -- house types and their neighbourly arrangement -- that gives content to the morphology. Housing is what forms the fabric of the city: How one defines and conceives housing is finally how one sees cities, and vice versa.

Consider Isfahan and Man-hattan. One is a matrix of low continuous buildings and covered streets punctuated by open to the sky courtyards, and the other is a grid of open streets, and buildings that form the streets and soar to the sky. Each morphology contains a certain spatial and social cohesiveness, even its own internal order and functional prerogatives and hierarchies. Each morphology is then an urban reality by itself, each a place assigned for certain promises and promises withheld at the same time. Each morphology is a city by itself.

Among the six cities of Dhaka, the oldest is the original settlement that grew along the river Buriganga characterised by its mixed-use buildings jostling against each other in a rambunctious way, its narrow, winding streets, and its traditionally organised neighbourhoods (mohollas). But that is old Dhaka of the romantic lore. Even within the old city there are now many diversities, but above all, the old city is coming apart at the seams. It is no longer able to sustain its morphological matrix in the onslaught of overwhelming commercialisation and further densification, and adoption of alien "development" strategies.

The so-called colonial part of the city forms the second morphology, which began as the site of new governmental, cultural, institutional, and residential buildings built by the British from the 1900s onwards around the old Race Course. The buildings of this city heralded the first move away from the river (and since then Dhaka has been incessantly moving farther and farther from the river), and also created the first prominent urban divide in Dhaka -- an urban racism if you like -- creating the sense of an "old" city seen as irksome and chaotic, and the new one with its euphoric possibilities. The old railway line that cut through where Nagar Bhaban now is demarcated the boundary of these two worlds. The nature of the desirable building unit also changed: A bungalow house in a large garden typified the building type in this morphology.

The third city is formed by post-1947 development of regulated and planned residential areas, and pockets of commercial and institutional growth. The quality of these developments still define the nature of urban planning for whatever it is worth, which is beginning to be obvious that it is not much considering the accelerating impoverishment of the urban environment. The planning was and still is based simply on plotting, that is, acquiring agricultural land and dividing that up in the most unimaginative way for privileged disbursement catering to some vague dream of a bungalow in a rose garden. This is the city of planning, of codes, setbacks and byelaws, and still the sole, advantaged model of urban living, created otherwise by a process reluctant to address the demographics and dynamics of a city in the twenty-first century.

In any case, the vision of a bungalow with a rose garden in the city is under threat internally by the users and dwellers themselves. As imagination-deficient planners keep mincing the plot-and-isolated-bungalow theme, the owners are immediately poised to subvert that to make a bastion of multiple dwellings (if not shops, clinics and schools). Take Dhanmandi for example, considered even now the paradigm of planning. From an imagery of secluded bungalows in an exclusive neighbourhood, whatever the worth of the idea was at that time, it has mutated under the inexorable laws of desires to a cacophony of buildings and functions. When a city is left to the instrumentation of mediocre planning unwilling to take up the challenge of new urban dynamics, and when that city succumbs to unilateral forces of personal desires and profits, strange things can happen. The old city that was left behind with such haste can return to haunt the skyline of the privileged city.

The fourth city is a strange and, strangely, treasured anomaly. The National Capital Complex at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, that represents the American architect Louis Kahn's vision of a government and civic complex in a deltaic landscape, forms an exclusive enclave in the form of a fourth city. The building complex of Sher-e-Bangla Nagar was a catalytic event that gave a new impetus to Dhaka, and provided an urban anchor for the city growing beyond the older areas. But what is perhaps strange is that the complex does not seem to make any visual correlation to the rest of the city, but as I see it, there is not much in the neighbourhood to make connections to. In curious ways, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar alludes to the world beyond Dhaka. The complex is not only about the stunning architecture of Sangsad Bhaban but the way buildings, parks, gardens, and lakes form a "garden city" and a treasured place of well-being (but who knows for how long as the city fathers have decided that they have every right to contaminate anything in their way). In a city of ruthless building activities, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar is a therapeutic island, showing that these two seemingly polarised conditions -- nature and city -- need not be incompatible, and that if ever there was an idea of a modern "Bengali" city, it is this.

The rest or most of Dhaka is formed by the fifth city, vast amorphous areas of semi and unplanned growth, a jumble of building and use types growing helter-skelter often with nominal infrastructure. This is the city of ubiquity, the predominant experience of Dhaka presenting a morphology like an amoeba that circles and penetrates and perforates the planned city, the city of codes and the city of byelaws, and thrusting them into the wind builds tanneries near residences, factories next to schools, bazaars on roads, and shops after shops after shops . . . There is no better proof than this that planning in this city has not failed but fled from the field where it is most needed.

There is still a sixth morphology, invisible but vital, that spreads out across Dhaka weaving in and out of the five morphologies, along the railways tracks, between buildings, on the sidewalks, and the flood dams, eked out by fresh migrants, vagrants, and generally by people at the periphery of planning, unrecognised and yet crucial to the visible city. This is the city that for a lack of appropriate term continues to be called a "slum" or a "shack." Planners elsewhere have described such a city as "spontaneous settlement," "self-help housing," even "city of joy," the last one reified in the semi-fictional work of Dominique Lapierre on such a settlement in Calcutta. The sixth city also makes the point that it would be a mistake to seek a morphology in the physical structure alone.

Why is the question of morphology critical? One needs to consider housing again: Housing is not just a numerical and fiscal matter; it can enhance the quality of life, both the life of the immediate dwellers and the life of the city. If housing is how one makes cities, then housing is Dhaka's greatest failure. One reason for the city's chaotic condition is that there have not been suitable large-scale residential models, and therefore morphological visions, for the many different communities that inhabit it. In short, housing and planning experts have not been able to provide any prospective image of how the people of Dhaka should live as a group in new or even restructured urban conditions.

None of the six morphologies is fixed and permanent; all are constantly being renovated and transformed by new desires and fresh possibilities. Dhanmandi, as I have said, that was originally planned as a bungalow-and-garden model has been changed beyond recognition into a beehive of buildings and apartments. A similar mutation is occurring to other so-called planned cities such as Gulshan, Baridhara and Uttara, proving just one thing: that the only planning strategy this city had has been superceded long ago by the laws of desire and free will.

An example of a biological metamorphosis is the creation of a butterfly, the arrival of an organism to a functional and aesthetical maturity. An urban metamorphosis does not automatically guarantee that. In fact, unless it is choreographed by the most skilled and dedicated professionals, the metamorphosis can only be calamitous.

Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, an architect and writer, currently teaches at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.