Dhaka's reputation as one of the least livable cities in the whole world is certainly not without justification -- after all, this is a city where the very air, more often than not, can threaten to make someone sick.
But one of the most troublesome ways that our capital city continues to live up to its ill reputation is perhaps in the sorry state of its urban planning. We have written time and again about the all-too-familiar urban problems of traffic congestion and water-logging in Dhaka, and have even discussed the reasons for it -- poor infrastructure, land encroachment, filling up of canals, to name a few.
With seemingly no end in sight to our urban planning woes, it is disheartening that the government's only solution thus far has been to set up authorization bodies that end up being ineffective at best and counter-intuitive at worst, as attested by the recent contempt of court rule given against government officials for being unable to evict illegal structures from Cox's Bazar beach. A directive they were supposed to start following well over a decade ago.
What exactly is the point of urban development bodies if they can't even be expected to do their job right?
More than most places in Bangladesh, our capital city stands firm as the most egregious example in how we just cannot seem to get urban planning right. With very little in the way of any overarching designs, our urban planners seem to have resorted to patchwork planning and development which have done us no favours. If anything, these disjointed and sporadic spurts of growth have left us worse off.
Bangladesh is at a critical juncture of its overall development, and a revamped urban planning scheme will increasingly become a part of that. But for that to pan out, the administration must provide the right incentives to the right people for the right kind of development.
