From time immemorial, the artisan community living in the Bengal Delta has lived in harmony with this transient terrain of land and water and harnessed the bountiful resources provided by this landscape. The lush green fertile lands and the innumerable vein-like waterways that crisscross the region, have been our source of food, shelter, education, and well-being. The monsoonal rains brought both floods as well as fertility to our lands. The eroding rivers gave way for new deltaic islands or chars where life could begin in a new rhythm. The storms attacked but were also subsided by a thick patch of coastal forest. The locals knew how the tidal rivers worked. They surely knew how to live with nature and not against it.
The ephemerality of the landscape made the locals of the Bengal Delta wise enough to live in a smart, effective, and flexible manner. For example, the most rudimentary landscape intervention they did was ‘dig and mound’. This resulted in an elevated stage to build the house away from flood water and a hollow for a pond, a source of living and livelihood, and a source for aquifer recharge. The houses were made of locally available, lightweight natural materials like bamboo, jute sticks, wood, and various types of reeds found in the floodplains of the mighty rivers and rivulets. A patch of homestead forest was seen along every household that was the source of food, fuel, protection, and helpful biodiversity. If the establishments diminished due to natural causes like rain, flood, storm, or river erosion, they could easily be re-made. When the lands were wholly covered with floodwater, the locals made floating beds for agricultural production. When the paths went underwater, they used boats. This inherent flexibility was the spirit of living and tuning in to this ever-changing landscape of land and water.
Unfortunately, with time, the people of Bengal gradually lost their inherent native wisdom and started hankering after a hollow sense of permanence. Of course, this was something they picked up, not within themselves but by foreign influence. There have been many traces of foreign invasions in this region before as well, but with the dawn of the British era, the oppression began not only on the people but also on the terrain. Coming from an entirely different geographical and climatic context, the British found it very difficult to cope with the ever-changing nature of the Bengal Delta. One day it was land and the next, the entire region would go underwater. The rivers were so enormous that it was beyond their comprehension, how they could deal with the floods. As they imposed themselves as the rulers of the region, they had to impose their establishments on the landscape too. This initiated the ever-increasing desire for permanence of land and living, and a desperation to control everything natural. Unfortunately, this notion soon crept its way through the minds of the locals as well.
To make it easier for themselves to earn revenues and to rule over the locals, the British made numerous land-based laws and made land a permanent element in the Bengal landscape. To keep the monsoonal flood water away from these apparently permanent lands, they lined up the river-edges with roads and embankments. They channelled rivers so that they could put a definite outline along rivers in the maps they made for invasion purposes. They cut down the hill forests and imposed harmful monocultural landscapes over vast hilly areas. They understood land-based agrarian economy and they transformed our entire system into that. Emulating their British lords, the local Zamindars made large permanent residential establishments near the land estates they owned. Following the Zamindars, the locals aspired to such permanence forgetting their past wisdom of flexibility and transience. After the long oppressive rule by the British, the situation did not get any better during the Pakistan occupancy period.
Even after the birth of sovereign Bangladesh, we continued to exploit nature and natural resources for individual profit maximization and focused only on monetary benefits just like the British oppressors. The nation still had an agrarian economy where land was desired to be permanent. The rivers were and still are imposingly controlled by dams, roads, and embankments which failed periodically. Despite having so many vein-like waterways, we are still continuously blocking and diminishing them by unnecessary road constructions and illegal encroachment. Our notion for development, only centres around large and heavy-weight hard infrastructural constructions. Politicians and policymakers also cater to that for quick public validation. The cities have grown in a very arbitrary manner, where people value only the monetary aspect of land parcels and ignore any other aspect of liveability in the urban realm. We have encroached on almost all open spaces, wetlands, ponds, and forests, namely any source of bio-philia in large cities like Dhaka and the most alarming thing is that other growing cities are going in the same direction. Aiding to this harsh reality of the present, our liveability, well-being, and safety are further threatened by global warming and climate change. People are becoming more and more helpless against climate-change-related disasters and the so-called development activities are failing to protect them. This is high time we remembered our forgotten past wisdom to co-exist with nature and its extremities.
Today, the entire world is concerned about climate change and realizes that nature-based solutions are the way to go forward. Nature-based solutions are measures that harness natural processes to address various social, economic, and environmental challenges. Nature-based solutions if implemented, have a wide array of co-benefits and are not at all more expensive than engineering or infrastructural solutions. They are smart, adaptive, and flexible to accommodate nature and its processes. Even a park, a group of trees, a pond, or a wetland can become an effective nature-based solution. The Western community, who used to heavily rely on hard infrastructural solutions to control nature and promote it worldwide, is now looking towards these robust nature-based ideas because they have realized that it is only wise to co-exist with nature and not fight with it where nature will ultimately take over any sort of human effort to control or defy it.
At present, our cities are faced with numerous climate-change-related urban challenges like urban heat, drought, water-logging, ecological degradation, environmental pollution, and overall low liveability index. The energy-intensive built environments are keeping some of the people cool for a certain time, but the city is heating up more and more due to these mechanical interventions and the gradual lack of tree covers. The ponds and wetlands are getting filled up for more development but the flood waters are standing still on the roads. The people are making more monetary profits in some cases but their health and well-being are being sharply compromised due to the lack of green and blue open spaces and vegetation covers in the city. In this scenario, we are forced to realize the fact that our so-called engineering solutions and developmental activities are creating more problems for us. Amidst all these negativities, we are observing a positive attitude among many concerned citizens, leaders, and specialists who are urging us to go towards a development regime where nature-based solutions are adopted for addressing socio-economic and environmental challenges.
As professionals in the field of architecture and landscape architecture, we want to believe that we can overcome our present urban challenges by adopting a nature-based approach where development will not only be physical but socio-ecological as well. We hope that our next generation will be more prompt in understanding our reality and act accordingly. For that, we need to encourage and educate them now. We need to make them realize that a nature-based approach is not something we will learn from the Western world, it has been our culture for hundreds of years before we were invaded by foreign occupancies. It took us 200 years to forget our native wisdom and another 100 years to make the situation worse. We hope the next 100 years will be the time we take to move forward in the right direction. It will not be easy, as much encroachment and damage have been done. But we hope for a future where we have decolonized our minds as well as our lands from imposing developmental encroachments and embraced nature as our ultimate solution.
Alia Shahed is an architect and landscape architect; assistant professor, Department of Architecture, BUET. Ahammad-Al-Muhaymin is an architect, landscape architect, architectural activist; assistant professor, Department of Architecture, BUET.
