No WC legacy for teeming Dhaka.2nd worst city to live in.

[Protectionist Gareth]

---

---

Bangladesh, it appears, has lost out on a golden opportunity to make Dhaka a better place to live. For the second year on the trot, the Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked the Bangladesh capital as the second worst liveable city in the world. Just two reasons can justify the ranking: Dhaka's population and traffic. Around 1.5 crore people are crammed into 300 sq km. and 400,000 cycle rickshaws clog the roads everyday.

DELHI COMPARISON
"We have heard how Delhi developed for the Commonwealth Games. But there was no development in and around Dhaka for the World Cup. Only the stadiums were renovated, and some of the roads leading to the venues, the team hotel, and the airport got a fresh coat of paint," Babu Bhai, who has been staying in Old Dhaka for three decades, said.

“The lighting, beautification, everything is temporary. It's not like Dhaka will be a better city after hosting the World Cup.”

BETTER LIVELIHOOD
Ramanikanta Roy, one of the 15 cycle rickshaw pullers who were part of the opening ceremony, says: “I have come here from Dinajpur because I can earn up to Tk 300 (Rs 190) per day, after paying the owner.” Only Chittagong and Khulna, being port towns, have managed to generate employment.

It is not as if the government does not care. Huge banners welcoming cricket, at every corner and around Tk 330 crore (Rs 210 crore) spent by the state, are signs the country wants to project its cricket. But the people would have hoped for much more than cosmetic changes and lighting in the streets.

No WC legacy for teeming Dhaka - Hindustan Times
__________________________________________________ _____
Please don't start India bashing now,it is the ranking coming from a international agency.

[fallstuff]

Dhaka is in a class by itself !!!

[CaPtAiN_pLaNeT]

By 2025 Dhaka will be the fastest growing city in the world... dhaka needs to be expanded from all side to have a viable and modern city and to cool down the price of property. Gazipur, narsingdi, savar, narayanganj could be brought under expanded dhaka.

[CaPtAiN_pLaNeT]

‘Dhaka to become fastest growing mega-city in world by 2025’

‘Dhaka to become fastest growing mega-city in world by 2025’

Dhaka
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Author / Source : DU CORRESPONDENT
E-mail Print PDF

DHAKA, JAN 12: The population of Bangladesh will grow up to 222 million by the year 2050 while Dhaka will become the fastest growing mega-city in the world by then, despite having a lower population growth-rate than what it had been in the last three decades. This was disclosed in a dialogue on ‘Population and development challenges in Bangladesh’ on Wednesday, organised by the Department of Population Sciences of the Dhaka University (DU) at the Senate Bhaban of the university incorporation with the UNFPA.
The country’s population is growing terrifically as compared to its territory. Around 1.8 to 2 million births are taking place each year, with more than 1,100 people living in an area of a square kilometre, said Professor AKM Nurun Nabi , Project Director of the Department of Population Sciences of DU, in his key note presentation.
Amongst the total population, 23 percent are adolescents, 68 percent are married by the age of 18 whereas 55 percent are identified as mothers before the age of 19, he revealed.
Professor Nabi said a total of 12,000 mothers die owing pregnancy related complications while more than seven percent maternal deaths occur due to obstetric caused problems, related to abortion and its complications.
“Population is interrelated to all the elements of a nation’s development and attainment of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) within the time frame is rationally dependent on our desired level of population,” said DU Vice Chancellor AAMS Arefin Siddique in his welcoming address.
Mr Arther Erken, UNFPA representative to Bangladesh moderated the programmee while DU Pro Vice Chancellor Dr Harun-or-Rashid, Mr Karl Ollinger, member of parliament (MP), Austria, Karin Roth MP of Germany, Claudia Niessen MP of Belgium, Petra Bayr, another MP of Austria, UNFPA Deputy Director Leyla Alyanak and six representatives of Bangladesh National Parliament among others were present at the event.

[CaPtAiN_pLaNeT]

Dhaka: fastest growing megacity in the world

Dhaka Bangladesh | Megacity | Urbanization

A five-part, multimedia series on the coming dystopia that is urbanization.
Erik German and Solana PyneSeptember 8, 2010 05:40


DHAKA, Bangladesh — The future is here, and it smells like burning trash.

As the evening call to prayer echoes across Dhaka’s teeming slums, a bluish haze rises in the murky air. Cooking happens mostly on open fires in the shantytowns of the Bangladeshi capital, the flames kindled with paper, scavenged lumber and bits of plastic junk.

On a recent evening in a broken labyrinth of shacks called the Korail slum, a wiry young mother in a red sari stooped to light the clay hearth outside her family’s one-room home. Mina, 24, touched her match to a castoff vinyl folder, three-hole-punched for documents she’ll never read.

“I don’t like to live in Dhaka,” she said, fanning the smoking plastic, then laying splintered bamboo on top. “But we have a dream to buy a piece of land, some land back in our village.”

Mina, who uses only one name, followed her husband here in 2009 — joining the nearly half-million migrants who pour into Dhaka each year. It’s not clear how soon, if ever, they’ll leave. Mina’s husband saves only a few dollars each month from his job selling fish. Mina, meanwhile, cares for their two children and, like millions of other women here, fires up the family’s nightly meal.

The smoke from these fires signals not a return to a prior age but, rather, the dawn of something new. Depending on how one measures, the planet now boasts 20 or so megacities — urban agglomerations where the United Nations estimates the population has reached 10 million or more. The world’s rapid urbanization is a reality fraught with both peril and hope. The peril is obvious. Overcrowding, pollution, poverty, impossible demands for energy and water all result in an overwhelming sense these megacities will simply collapse. But the hope, while less obvious, needs more attention. The potential efficiencies of urban living, the access to health care and jobs, along with plummeting urban birth rates have all convinced some environmental theorists the migration to cities may in fact save the planet. But only, these experts hasten to add, if this shift is well managed.

Among these megacities, The World Bank says Dhaka, with its current population of 15 million people, bears the distinction of being the fastest-growing in the world. Between 1990 and 2005, the city doubled in size — from 6 to 12 million. By 2025, the U.N. predicts Dhaka will be home to more than 20 million people — larger than Mexico City, Beijing or Shanghai.

Mass migration, booming populations and globalized trade are swelling cities worldwide, but these forces are perhaps more powerfully concentrated in Dhaka than anywhere on earth — offering a unique window on an urban planet soon to come.

“You are seeing the early future of the world, which is not a very pleasant thought,” said Atiq Rahman, a Dhaka climate and migration researcher who heads the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies. Explosive growth in cities like Dhaka, he said, has created “a cluster of demographic chaos.”

The earth’s countryside is emptying out, more quickly all the time. It took about 10,000 years for the human population to become 3 percent urban — a period extending roughly from the dawn of human settlement until 1800. A century later, Earth was still just 14 percent urban. But in 2007, the United Nations announced we’d crossed a monumental threshold. For the first time, more than 50 percent of the world lived in cities rather than rural villages and farms. By 2030, some projections say more than 80 percent of humanity will be urban, with many inhabiting the slum-choked cities of the developing world.



The shift is “a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions,” urban theorist Mike Davis wrote in his book “Planet of Slums.”

In the simplest sense, this transformation has a dual cause: Masses of migrants are abandoning the countryside, and they keep having babies after coming to town. By some accounts, fertility is a larger slice of the pie.

“It’s roughly a 40/60 split,” said Deborah Balk, an urbanization specialist with the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research in New York City. “We have more large concentrations of people than we’ve ever had before. That is new. And those concentrations themselves, they have momentum.”

As many as half of the newcomers worldwide will end up in medium-sized cities with populations of up to half a million people, by the U.N.’s count. But many migrants will make their home in a growing number of megacities — urban giants such as the world has never seen.

By 2025 the U.N. predicts that Delhi, Dhaka, Kolkata, Mumbai, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo and Shanghai will all have populations of more than 20 million. Tokyo is projected to become home to some 37 million — three times the current population of Greece.

A few of the elder giants — New York, Tokyo, Paris — grew huge under the influence of forces that helped give birth to modernity itself: the rise of nation states, manufacturing and mass domestic markets.

“The old cities developed out of industrialization,” Balk said. “But you don’t see that happening now.”

Many new cities are getting big without growing rich. Megacities like Lagos, Nigeria; Karachi, Pakistan; and Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, barely registered on the world stage at mid-century. The millions inhabiting each city now still survive largely off the financial grid.

“These are poor cities, and that divide is really important,” Balk said. “There was poverty in London, New York, and Paris and Tokyo 100 years ago — and there still is poverty in some of those cities — but they never had slums in the way you see in today’s contemporary poor cities.”

Among these slum cities, Dhaka represents an extreme case. The Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies estimates that as much as half of Dhaka’s population lives in the vast, hand-built shantytowns that grow here like kudzu on any open patch of ground — beside rail lines, along riverbanks and in swampy lowlands shadowed by high-rise hotels.

“The megacity of the poor,” is how the urban geographer Nazrul Islam describes his hometown. He estimates that about 70 percent of Dhaka’s households earn less than $170 per month. The bottom 40 percent take home less than half that, he said. Most of the migrants come betting life in Dhaka will beat life in the village. Unlike in China, which places stiff restrictions on internal migration, it’s a choice Bangladeshis are free to make.

“There has been no restriction on city-ward migration,” Islam said. “Whenever there is a disaster, people tend to move.”

As a growing number of researchers worry that climate and environmental shocks will spur mass migration worldwide, ecologically-fragile Bangladesh may offer a taste of what’s in store. Each season, cyclones, floods and creeping sea-level rise drive thousands of Bangladeshis from their villages.

“The country is always facing some disaster,” said Ranajit Das, an aid worker who has spent his career in Dhaka’s slums. “Every year.”

The displaced have few options. This river-delta nation sits wedged between India and Myanmar and it remains one of the most densely settled countries on Earth. Bangladesh’s population of 150 million people — about half the United States — is crammed into an area smaller than the state of Iowa. The country has but one administrative and economic center. For Bangladeshis on the move, Islam said, “their first destination is the large city, Dhaka.”

While a third of the newcomers see their incomes fall after arriving in the slums, Islam’s research suggests that over time, the majority hold steady or see their wages rise. “For some people it is a trap,” he said. “But for many people it’s also a platform to move up economically and also socially.”

Some researchers say there are also sound ecological reasons to welcome the dawn of an urban planet. To start with, a planet of cities could avert a scenario where an ever-rising human population is doomed to fight over ever-dwindling resources.

Here’s why: As countries urbanize, birthrates tend to decline. In most industrialized, urban countries, birthrates consistently remain at or below replacement levels, defined as 2.1 children per couple.

The incentives behind the trend are simple, argues Phillip Longman in his 2004 book, “The Empty Cradle.” Rural families need large numbers of children to help raise crops and livestock. But in a city high-rise or crowed slum, there is little or no economic incentive to have children. In fact, for women considering childbearing versus working, the incentives are reversed. The world’s cities are still growing in absolute terms but, as the pool of potential mothers shrinks, population growth will slow and, finally, fall.

“If this seems counterintuitive, think of a train accelerating up a hill,” Longman writes. “If the engine stalls, the train will still move forward for a while, but its loss of momentum implies that it will soon be moving backwards, and at even greater speed.”

Regardless of present birthrates in third-world slums, Longman says the migrants will soon submit to the same pressures that are driving fertility down everywhere else. Urbanization is among the factors the U.N. cites when predicting that Earth’s population will eventually level off around 9 billion.

The trend has led environmental theorists like Stewart Brand to declare that third-world urbanization has “defused the population bomb.”

“The Whole Earth Catalogue” co-founder said the mass shift from rural village to urban slum is good for the planet in other ways, too. Cities — even slum cities — use energy more efficiently than villages do, Brand says, and leaving villages behind helps blunt the environmental devastation wrought by subsistence farming.

“There’s a hell of a lot of landscape growing back. Ecologically that’s great and in terms of climate that’s great,” Brand said.

Rather than fighting informal communities, Brand says governments ought to embrace them, and give slum-dwellers better security, connect them to utility grids and encourage entrepreneurs.

“The old thinking is that slums were the problem,” Brand said. “The new way of thinking is they’re the solution.”

[Roybot]

Bangladesh needs a new city along with a dedicated sez, well planned and with adequate infrastructure. . It will attract a lot of investments. You guys are in the major league now(economy wise) its time to build the infrastructure.

[Gonjo]

Thread is from the jealous Indian Media. And, lets see what AFP is saying about Dhaka's performance in this World Cup:

And it is going out of its way to put on a party to remember.

So far, Bangladesh has proved to be the perfect hosts, creating a delightful World Cup atmosphere that would have pleased International Cricket Council (ICC) chiefs.

Unlike empty stands at matches in the other two hosting nations, packed crowds have witnessed the first two matches played by Bangladesh against India and Ireland in Dhaka.

Source: AFP: Cricket-crazy Bangladesh calm before next storm

Where Indian sites are crippled with corruption from Commonwealth Games Scandal and still continuing (Eden Garden have lost one match to host in cric wc), they should back down before criticism of neighbors.

[jellodragon]

Dhaka is poor city... 70% of pop live on $170/month...

[clmeta]

Fastest growing in the world???? Joke of the day.

By 2025 Dhaka will be the fastest growing city in the world... dhaka needs to be expanded from all side to have a viable and modern city and to cool down the price of property. Gazipur, narsingdi, savar, narayanganj could be brought under expanded dhaka.

[aazidane]

I dont care what stats say, for me it is the best city in the world....midnight racing with no speedlimit and basically freedom to do whatever I like...on a serious note dhaka needs a metro/subway anything to put the traffic down, my office in dhaka is quite close to my house so I don't see much traffic and i don't travel during the day time because the traffic is unbearable. You couple be stuck in the same spot and not move in an inch for an hour in the same spot. After 9 pm the traffic goes away

[clmeta]

Agreed.............

Dhaka is poor city... 70% of pop live on $170/month...

[jellodragon]

^^^^ Haha you can do midnight racing in any South Asian city

[aazidane]

^^^^ Haha you can do midnight racing in any South Asian city

Dhaka police is the friendliest police in the world I have been even taken to the police station a couple of times, they let me go after 3 hours. In other places the offense i had committed i'd be serving jail for at least 6 months.



Dhaka is not that bad

[Avisheik]

Here is the thing about dhaka

1) Political, historical centre for Bangladesh since the Sena empire

2) most of the infrastructure(warehouse, ports), schools was built here during the british times, so powerful businessmen moved their business here to make use of these infrastructure and get their kids educated

3) as factories are being moved to dhaka, so will employment opportunities, so basically ppl in villages will see dhaka as a employment hub.

4) As ppl move in to dhaka, they will bring their family along. So demand for goods and services(food, education) will increase

5) Since demand increases, Ppl will want to cash in on the demand(example, more schools will be built in dhaka to meet the demand for education, teachers from other parts of the country may be hired to come to dhaka to teach), so populaton increases in dhaka

6) this continues on and on and dhaka's population size increases rapidly

7) The situation is made worse by the fact that, the government cannot keep up the rate of infrastructure development with the population increase rate

[idune]

---

---

Dhaka, specially for indians to enjoy