Dhaka in between the formal-informal

TS + SK: How do you situate Dhaka in terms of its potential to study urban issues?

KD: Dhaka, in my understanding, is a city that is unique, but is also not atypical of a range of megacities. It is a very big city that has grown substantially, with much of that growth being informal. “Informal,” in one sense, means urban development that occurs outside the formal control of a planning scheme. The state puts in place a planning scheme and says that this is a residential area or that it has a particular street morphology and then the informal processes take over and a different kind of functional mix and land use emerges. Indeed, a different kind of morphology often emerges if there are height limits and setbacks – they are often violated. Therefore, you get a very informal process layered on top of a formal process. Many people in Bangladesh would actively argue that the mix of formal and informal is quite negative. They might use examples of the recent fire in Puran Dhaka, which is largely seen as the result of unregulated informal mix of functions and therefore, you can notice a quest to sanitise the city, to formalise, to strip out uses into different parts. How would you counter that? The idea of a functional mix is often seen as a problem in the over-informalised cities in the Global South, and yet is seen as something that there is not enough of in what I call the over-formalised cities of the Global North. The discipline of urban planning began in the early 20th century in order to solve problems of mix, such as noxious industries located right next to places where children are growing up or being educated. Therefore, there is such a thing as a dysfunctional juxtaposition of functions. You cannot have a steelwork and a housing project adjacent to each other. There are, hence, many legitimate reasons to separate functions. Urban design theory in the West since Jane Jacobs, the famous urbanist in the ‘60s, has moved decidedly towards the idea that a mix of functions is a necessary part of every city.

Click here to read the interview published in the Daily Star, the highest circulated national daily in Bangladesh.

Click here to read the unabridged version in ContextBD.com