The biggest wetland in Dhaka nobody knows about
Before the construction of the beribadh in the early 1990s, the nameless water body was part of the overflow zone of the Turag River.
2m ago
Dhaka, an inequal city
It is no wonder that a vast population of Dhaka are generally disgruntled with where they are.
2m ago
The future of the city, the city of the future
The city is perhaps the greatest innovation carried out by humans. Although nature has been used as an analogy in conceiving the fabric of the city, there is no such thing as the “city” in nature.
9m ago
Muzharul Islam: A ‘vastukalabid’ for modern Bengal
Described as the doyen of Bangladesh’s architecture, Muzharul Islam introduced modernism in the country as well as the highest ideals of the craft.
11m ago
A Dhaka we’ll want to arrive at
The city, the one that we want to arrive at, remains illusory
1y ago
The city is a beautiful thing when it’s for everyone
A city is a web of facilities and opportunities in which different agencies and communities lay stakes, push boundaries, and make bullish claims of making things better.
1y ago
Crossing the Padma
Here was a river that was larger than life, larger than anything I had encountered before. Flowing gloriously and indifferently, the river presented a mythic scale against which I felt terribly puny.
1y ago
July 9, 2022
Metrophilia: How to Love Dhaka
If you want to fall in love with the city—walk. This simple aphorism opens up a full discourse on how we can make our cities liveable and civic, and how we might live together as a collective.
October 31, 2021
Dhaka needs new urban-forms
If the city is the new challenge of the time, the “edge” of the city is at the heart of it.
March 1, 2021
120th birth anniversary of Architect Louis I. Kahn
February 20 was the 120th birth anniversary of the famed American architect Louis I. Kahn whose monumental architectural creation is the National Assembly (Sangsad Bhaban) of Bangladesh.
March 1, 2021
Louis Kahn's Capital Complexity
The National Capital Complex in Dhaka, designed by Louis Kahn, is an epic work in the annals of modern architecture. Even after sixty years of its conception, Kahn’s complex remains a wondrous phenomenon that is continuously renewing the purposes of architecture.
February 19, 2021
Future cities: A short guide to a Bengali urbanism
When al-Mansur laid the foundation of Baghdad in 762 on the banks of the Tigris, he imagined an ideal city in the shape of a round plan.
December 14, 2020
Imagining a Dhaka for 2035
No one doubts the magnitude of complexity that shrouds Dhaka, this city of 16 million poised between being the worst liveable and an economic colossus.
October 28, 2020
Naked cities
During a run for essentials, I ran into a graffiti on a wall at a Philadelphia exit ramp: “Civilisation is pandemic.” On any other day, I would not even think twice about such a street-smart philosophical pronouncement.
February 16, 2020
We Are the City
I dream of a city where turning the corner of an alley, in front of a shop of curios and old books, I decide what I want to do for the rest of my life.
April 3, 2019
A Fire Next Door
Before the amber of the last one turn to ashes and forgotten memories, a new flame leaps up in another neighbourhood of the city, revealing, once again, cracks in the façade of our tilottoma.
February 10, 2019
An Urbanism for Dhaka
A city is not mere buildings, streets and spaces; it is a theatre of social actions. And it is in that theatre, according to the American urbanist Lewis Mumford, that “man's more purposive activities…work out, through conflicting cooperative
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