First Master Plan for Dhaka City: An Environmental Exploration

Dhaka is one of the fastest growing megacities in the world. By 2025 the city, with about 20 million people, is predicted to be demographically larger than Beijing, Mexico City or Shanghai. Such remarkable urban dynamics have informed contemporary and future concerns in the current literature. However, in this literature there is a lack of historical understanding of Dhaka’s urban experiences. The disconnect between Dhaka’s past, present and future urban issues is even more remarkable in terms of the lack of engagement with its environmental past. This article is an attempt to examine the nature of environmental considerations in the evolving urban planning. For such an exercise, the first master plan of 1960 is crucial for a number of reasons. Although Dhaka existed on different sites and in varying shapes since the ancient period, the first clear and large scale planning for the city emerges in the form of this master plan. The plan was mooted at the juncture of colonial and postcolonial influences but became the foundation of many future plans and aspirations for the city landscape. The plan also raised the question of how environment was placed in the context of space-making in modern times. The paper aims to explore this master plan as a yardstick to understand Dhaka’s evolving planning regimes and its environmental implications. 1. Dhaka before the First Master Plan The Dhaka city has flourished, declined and re-surfaced at least four times in the past 2,500 years, namely at the sites of Wari-Bateshwar, Vikrampur, Sonargaon and the present location where it emerged in the early 17th century. The perpetuity of Dhaka as an urban centre, albeit under different names and at adjacent locations, was informe