Arya News - The writer muses: "Saving Dhaka and surviving Dhaka require urban imagination equal parts practical and sentimental. It will also require, crucially, an acceptance that cities are not just engines of GDP but living, breathing things where mental wellbeing is as important as physical wellbeing."
DHAKA – Dhaka is a city that welcomes you with the earnest confidence of an uncle who believes personal space is a wildly overrated Western myth. Imagine 36.6 million (3.66 crore) people packed into a place collapsing under its own weight. Where buses lean on each other for moral support, “Bangla Tesla” drivers navigate like blind trapeze artists, and the air carries so much lead it could release its own heavy-metal album. Now stop imagining. We live this life every day.
According to the UN’s 2025 urban report, Dhaka has climbed to the second spot in the global city rankings and is slated, alarmingly, to become the world’s most populous city by 2050.
For those watching from afar, the question often comes up: what is it really like to live in Dhaka? In short, it’s an exercise in contradiction, and a masterclass in patience. It is maddening and tender, chaotic and inventive. Mornings begin with the smell of dudh-cha and the soft roar of a city that never really slept; evenings close with the orchestra of horns, the occasional miking, and mosquitoes. Absolute silence is rare, and expensive — available only in upscale areas. Markets spill over with mangoes, cheap clothes, and unsolicited opinions. Tea stalls solve national policy under 10 minutes. The city’s rapid, unplanned growth is suffocating the things that make a city liveable: green space, clean rivers and waterbodies, and a functioning waste disposal system.
Let’s be frank: the infrastructure is essentially a well-meaning but exhausted host. Sewers clog with despair. In places the drains are applauding the population growth by bursting at the seams — a phenomenon The Guardian memorably described as Dhaka “bursting at the sewers.”
Why did this happen? How did this happen?
Partly because of climate change and partly because opportunities still pull people into urban cores. When rivers flood or croplands erode, families move to Dhaka clutching what they can, and the city absorbs them like a sponge someone forgot to wring out. The UN ties Dhaka’s explosive growth to climate-driven displacement and rural distress, a pattern that will only intensify unless something structural changes.
And then there are the rivers, the canals, and the lakes — once the lungs of the city, now more of a memory wrapped in plastic. Attempts at restoration are underway, but the river ecosystems of Dhaka have been squeezed between industrial effluents and urban waste. Restoring them won’t be a weekend DIY project; it will take policy, money, and a collective willingness to treat water as life rather than a dumping ground. The World Economic Forum has argued for ecological restoration as not only desirable but essential to long-term urban health.
If you listen closely, Dhaka whispers another controversial suggestion: maybe it shouldn’t be the centre of every Bangladeshi’s universe anymore. Some analysts have floated this idea as a radical but practical fix; whether it’s politically feasible is another matter altogether.
But let us not turn solemn. For all its headaches, Dhaka is stubbornly human. There’s humour in the chaos: the CNG driver who claims he knows a “shortcut” and promptly drives you into a three-hour jam, or the bus helper who insists there’s still space when the laws of physics say otherwise.
It’s a city where small kindnesses are currency: a stray mother dog and her pups being fed by three different households; a child teaching an elder how to use a smartphone; the moment an accident happens, people rush in from all sides — lifting the injured, stopping traffic, and taking them to the nearest hospital. Random acts of kindness and an almost hard-wired sense of community form the unseen infrastructure that keeps Dhaka breathing.
Saving Dhaka and surviving Dhaka require urban imagination equal parts practical and sentimental. It will also require, crucially, an acceptance that cities are not just engines of GDP but living, breathing things where mental wellbeing is as important as physical wellbeing.
When we plan, we must factor in dignity — the dignity of acceptable accommodation, of usable public toilets, of a lake that invites you to take a dip or at the very least sit by it while you catch your breath, of public transport and roads that don’t exhaust you before you even start your workday.
For those who write about cities (and try to do it without making them sound like impersonal case studies), Dhaka is irresistible. It punches above its weight in warmth and being resourceful. The irony is delicious: a city strained to the breaking point remains somehow full of optimism, music, food, and the most elaborate everyday hospitality you’ll find anywhere. If Dhaka is the world’s fastest-growing human experiment, then it is also the world’s most stubborn love letter to improv — messy, earnest, and occasionally brilliant.
So, what’s it like to live in Dhaka? It’s like using a well-worn family car. It rattles when you hit a speed bump, and every so often it decides to stall in the middle of traffic just to keep you humble. But when it’s humming, when the engine cooperates, it takes you everywhere. To the people you love, the work that exhausts you, the joys that revive you, and the small, ridiculous everyday drama that make the ride worth it.