As the monsoon winds down each year, the conversation around urban waterlogging in Bangladesh begins to fade. The rains eventually ease, the streets become dry, and the images of submerged roads and stranded commuters gradually disappear from our screens. Until the next heavy downpour brings them all back.
That is perhaps the most predictable part of Bangladesh's urban waterlogging crisis. Every monsoon, we go through the same cycle: Heavy rain, flooded streets, public frustration, a flurry of criticism and promises, followed by a return to business as usual once the water recedes.
What is missing is a sustained effort to understand why our cities remain so vulnerable and, more importantly, what can be done differently.
For a glimpse of what this cycle means on the ground, consider a familiar scene in Dhaka's Shantinagar neighbourhood.
For local shopkeepers, the heavy monsoon rain offers little relief from the heat. Instead, it signals a familiar scramble to protect their goods. Sacks of wholesale rice are quickly pulled onto higher wooden pallets, expensive electronics are moved onto top shelves, and makeshift sandbags are dragged to storefronts.
Within 45 minutes, the asphalt street became a stagnant urban river. Rickshaws pushed through waist-deep water as passengers lifted their belongings above it. This was a routine afternoon in July, not the aftermath of a super-cyclone.
Yet we have normalized this seasonal flooding as the inevitable price of living in a rapidly expanding metropolis. The problem is not simply the rain, but how poorly we manage it.
Redefining the relationship with water
In recent years, the discourse in our cities has at least begun to shift. People are slowly moving away from blaming the clouds with a growing recognition of realities on the ground, that the aging drains and sinking ground are as much to blame as the sky. Naming the problem is merely step one; solving it is the real challenge.
The global North has embraced the “sponge city” model, using permeable surfaces, continuous mechanical sweeping, and underground systems to absorb and store rainwater. But importing this model into cities burdened by silt, dust, waste, and weak maintenance systems would be a recipe for quick failure.
If our concrete drains already struggle with solid waste, we need an approach suited to our own reality. That means moving from trying to keep water out, to a cooperative approach of giving it safe spaces to go.
Singapore turned this idea into reality at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. It replaced a 2.7 km concrete canal, once known as “the long drain,” with a winding, planted river through a public park. Its banks use roots and rock instead of concrete, allowing the river to spread across the park during heavy rain, slow down and drain without flooding nearby neighborhoods. In dry weather, the same space becomes a lawn for families and children.
What is striking is the cost. The greener river was about 15% cheaper than rebuilding the concrete, while carrying more water and the wildlife rose by roughly a third. Working with the water was the cheaper option whereas fighting it was the more expensive. That single fact dispels the excuse that this type of design is a luxury for our cities.
Places designed to flood on purpose
The global standard for managing overwhelming stormwater is moving away from rapid channelization and toward the creation of temporary flood spaces. In highly dense urban environments like Rotterdam, architects have pioneered the concept of water squares.
These are sunken public plazas that function as basketball courts, skate parks, or open-air amphitheaters during the dry months. When a heavy rainfall hits, they are transformed into massive, safe water retention basins until the city's drains can cope, then releasing it.
For Bangladesh, this idea can be adapted without the high maintenance costs of European-style public spaces. Imagine a school playground in Mirpur, a stadium bowl, or a neglected field in Chittagong, each built slightly lower than the surrounding streets.
Most of the year, they remain what they are: Places to play. But on the few days when heavy rain arrives, the surrounding roads can be graded so water flows into them by gravity rather than into shops and homes.
There is no pump to fail or imported parts to replace. Once the rain stops and the drains clear, the temporary pond drains away, and the children return. Accepting that a few designated places will flood is far more practical than pretending our streets will not.
Daylighting canals, shared prosperity
Singapore's celebrated transformation of the Kallang River from a plain concrete drainage channel into a naturalized, winding waterway offers a compelling visual of ecological urbanism. However, our reality involves a vastly different socio-economic landscape, primarily defined by heavy solid waste pollution and informal settlements.
For 30 years, our answer to a filthy canal has been to roof it over into a box culvert and stop looking at it, which simply hides the silt until it hardens into a plug no crew can reach without breaking the road above.
The better path would have been the opposite, to break those concrete lids and daylight the channels back into open water. Researchers mapped this for Dhaka's Begunbari canal, but past attempts prove daylighting alone fails.
Hatirjheel was meant to be Dhaka’s Bishan, a decaying canal system reborn as a wide lake in the heart of the capital. Late last year it won a major international award. In the same season, the people staying beside it were holding their noses, because the lake had become a sewage pond.
Its treatment chemicals exhausted earlier and a waterbody the size of a small town is maintained by a handful of workers. The idea was not wrong, but the sequence was. The lake was opened before stopping the sewage flow into it, so it was already being poisoned on inauguration day.
When Seoul uncovered its own celebrated stream downtown, it refused that mistake and treated the removal of sewage as a precondition of the project, laying pipes to carry the district's waste away first. The result today is a green ribbon that cools the streets around it. Seoul cleaned the water, then reopened it. We reopened ours, then let it rot.
A daylighted canal will work only if cleaning is built into its design from day one. To prevent these canals from becoming open sewers again, we also need to make better use of one of our most overlooked urban resources: The informal waste economy.
Instead of relying only on municipal cleaning crews, the canals could be designed with simple trash traps, floating barriers, and accessible collection points. Informal waste pickers could then have safe and structured access to these points, helping remove plastics and other waste before they cause blockages.
Native wetland plants along the canal banks could further stabilize the soil, reduce erosion, and filter some surface pollutants. Together, these measures can reduce the pressure on already stretched municipal budgets.
In Singapore, water quality is supported by designed wetlands and natural filtration. In Bangladesh, we could also harness the people already working within our informal waste economy, giving them a safer and more productive role in keeping our waterways clear.
Mandating rainwater retention
A significant but rarely discussed driver of our drainage crisis is the burden that unchecked private development places on public infrastructure.
Every new commercial high-rise or apartment block that covers its plot with concrete sends more rainwater into already overwhelmed streets and drains.
The solution is to make large developments manage more of their own runoff. Building codes could require blue roofs that temporarily store rainwater and release it slowly, along with underground cisterns to collect water for flushing, cooling, and irrigation.
This would reduce the pressure on struggling, underfunded city corporations and make private developers share the cost of the urban growth from which they profit.
Portland's breakthrough came from embracing the power of the small. The American city once struggled with severe storm overflows that dumped raw sewage into its riverways. Rather than building a massive infrastructure, Portland paid ordinary citizens to disconnect 56,000 rooftop downspouts from the municipal sewers.
By letting rainwater absorb into private gardens, the city diverted over a billion gallons a year from its overloaded network. This approach endures because it lacks mechanical complexity. In a country like Bangladesh where centralized machinery is often the first to fail and the last to be repaired, this decentralized simplicity is worth more than any monument.
Empowering community guardianship
Every one of these ideas runs, in the end, onto the same reef that wrecked Hatirjheel, our national habit of celebration with grand inauguration ceremonies, only to be abandoned to long-term neglect.
To break this cycle, we must look backward to traditional practices. Historically, the maintenance of local water bodies, ponds, and drainage channels was a communal responsibility, deeply embedded in the civic fabric of rural life.
As millions migrated to the cities, this intrinsic stewardship was completely outsourced to a faceless, sprawling bureaucracy, leading to widespread apathy and a disconnect between citizens and their immediate environment.
We should be able to revive this stewardship by formalizing community guardianship over neighborhood drainage networks. Instead of awarding massive maintenance contracts to distant corporate entities who have no stake in the community's well-being, city authorities could issue decentralized micro-contracts.
These contracts would be awarded to local neighbourhood cooperatives, youth groups, or even organized associations within the informal settlements situated directly alongside the water bodies.
Paying the local community a steady wage to maintain the flow and cleanliness of their own immediate drainage channels ensures continuous, hyper- localized oversight.
Embracing local realities
Surviving the harsh, changing realities of our rain-battered delta requires abandoning the idea that engineering alone can control water. We cannot concrete our way out of the monsoon, nor can we simply rely on importing green infrastructure designed for very different climates.
The goal is not to become Singapore, Rotterdam, or Seoul. Their climate is different from ours, their resources are greater, and their institutions work differently. But they offer an important lesson: Water does not always have to be pushed away.
Cities can be designed to hold it, slow it down, and let it pass. The challenge for Bangladesh is to find ways to apply that principle to our own climate, resources, and realities.
The rain will fall again. Shopkeepers in Shantinagar and many other parts of the country will once again move their goods to higher shelves, just as they have done for years. We cannot stop the rain. But we can decide what happens when it falls.
Somewhere in this city, a dead, black canal could, within a few years, become a clean waterway where children play beside the water and families sit on the bank on a pleasant evening.
Dr Sabbir Ahmad, a tech executive with global experience in digital connectivity, sustainable infrastructure and energy, now shaping Bangladesh's semiconductor landscape as the CEO of Silicon Array Ltd. Email: [email protected].
