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CITY PLANNING ON THE EDGE: Dhaka’s frail infrastructure makes it vulnerable to myriad disasters
Hanging in The Balance
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angladeshi architect shamsul wares sits in his sixth-floor office in downtown Dhaka and watches
as a potential catastrophe unfolds outside his window. Less than a meter beyond the glass, workmen labor on
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an office building that will rise 18 stories. Wares is as-
tonished by the structure’s shoddy construction. When he sits there, he sometimes imagines the adjacent building beginning to sway and crack just before it comes crashing through his window. “It’s frightening,” he says. “One badly constructed building can destroy the neighborhood, and Dhaka is covered by dangerous, substandard structures like this one.” Bangladeshi urban planner Salma Shafi agrees and gets right to the point: “Dhaka is a disaster waiting to happen.” It’s hard to argue with her. Today both natural and man-made disasters seem poised to strike the “Garden City” with little more than a moment’s notice. Originally designed to be home to a million people before the country’s independence in 1971, Dhaka has since grown into a chaotic megacity of 12 million. Every year the population grows by roughly 400,000, as mostly poor, rural migrants settle into the more than 3,000 bamboo and tin slums scatDhaka has weathered tered about the city. Its population density of 300,000 people per floods, cyclones and square kilometer tops the likes of Mumbai. And worse, Dhaka shows no signs of slowing down. Demographers predict that by 2015 Dhaka a booming population. will be the world’s fourth largest city, with a population of nearly 23 million, more than half of whom will live in shantytowns. But surviving from But troubling as the numbers are, it’s Dhaka’s haphazard development— with little to no official oversight or planning—that has led its name to be one disaster to the added to the ledger of Asian urban basket cases. Today the Bangladeshi capital suffers from a shortage of clean drinking water, with human and next is no way to live. chemical waste polluting wells, rivers and lakes. Developers mindlessly devour valuable wetlands while cobbling together new housing com-
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NEWSWEEK SPECIAL ISSUE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ABIR ABDULLAH FOR NEWSWEEK
DRIK
By Ron Moreau