Look closely at how Dhaka actually moves, and a different story emerges. The buses and horns take the headlines, but at street level, most people are simply walking. They walk to the corner shop, to school, to the kitchen market, to the mosque, to the rickshaw stand that carries them the last kilometre. The city the world files under “gridlock” is, on the ground, one of the most walking-dependent places on earth.
That is not a matter of temperament. It is a matter of how close everything is. The latest household survey behind the government’s Updating and Revised Strategic Transport Plan (URSTP) counted about 38 million trips on an average day across greater Dhaka, up from roughly 28 million in 2014. Most of those trips never leave the neighbourhood: around six in ten are shorter than two kilometres, and about eight in ten are under five.
Despite its reputation for crippling traffic congestion, Dhaka remains one of the most walking-dependent cities in the world, with many daily journeys covering only short distances. Photo: Star
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Despite its reputation for crippling traffic congestion, Dhaka remains one of the most walking-dependent cities in the world, with many daily journeys covering only short distances. Photo: Star
Walking is the single largest mode, accounting for close to 38 per cent of trips, while rickshaws carry a quarter or more. The private car, the machine that reorganised cities across the West, accounts for well under one trip in twenty.
This is the anatomy of a compact city, whether or not anyone set out to build one. The phrase is worth examining more closely, because its history is often misunderstood.
A borrowed idea and a mistaken one
The compact city was not invented in Asia. The term comes from a 1973 book by two American mathematicians, George Dantzig and Thomas Saaty, who sketched a dense, resource-thrifty settlement in which distance, and therefore waste, was kept to a minimum. Europe took up the idea and developed it through the 1990s, from the European Commission’s 1990 Green Paper on the Urban Environment to a wave of research on what a “sustainable urban form” should look like. Tokyo and Hong Kong are highlighted as living proof that millions can live well at high density around good public transport, but the two cities are exhibits in the argument, not its birthplace. The distinction matters for Dhaka because it shows that the compact city was always a deliberate answer to a specific error: sprawl.
Sprawl, too, is misremembered. No one drew up the low-density, car-dependent American suburb as an ideal to aspire to; it emerged from a series of policy choices. Federal mortgage insurance rewarded new detached houses over dense old neighbourhoods, a vast publicly funded highway programme reshaped the map, and single-use “Euclidean” zoning pulled homes apart from shops and workplaces. The car finished the job. Sprawl is what a country gets when land is cheap, fuel is cheap and the rulebook forbids mixing. Dhaka has none of those conditions: land here is scarce and dear, fuel is costly, and the rules against mixing have rarely held.
What failed in Dhaka was not planning as such, but the imported belief that a living city can be sorted into zones. The mixed, stacked, ground-floor-shop neighbourhood kept reasserting itself because, in a city this dense, it is the arrangement that works.
Dhaka has been planned, and repeatedly—Wari, then Dhanmondi, Gulshan, Banani and Uttara, each laid out as an orderly, largely residential district. In almost every case, the single-use plan dissolved under the pressure of daily life. Dhanmondi’s quiet residential roads filled with schools, clinics, banks and restaurants; Gulshan and Banani sprouted offices and shops on plots meant for houses. Eventually, the state stopped resisting and began charging conversion fees instead. What failed in Dhaka was not planning as such, but the imported belief that a living city can be sorted into zones. The mixed, stacked, ground-floor-shop neighbourhood kept reasserting itself because, in a city this dense, it is the arrangement that works.
From compact city to fifteen minutes
This brings us to the idea now fashionable in design magazines. The “15-minute city”, associated with the urbanist Carlos Moreno and adopted by the mayor of Paris, asks a plain question: can you reach the essentials of daily life—work, food, health, schooling and somewhere to unwind—within a quarter-hour walk or cycle from home? It is the compact city’s younger cousin, but not simply a rebranding. The compact city is an argument about form: density, mixed use and the structure that allows public transport to pay for itself.
Moreno’s version is an argument about time, and it adds a fairness test: those fifteen minutes must belong to everyone, not just to well-serviced enclaves.
By the first measure, Dhaka is already there. Proximity is the one resource this city has in surplus: a kitchen market, a pharmacy, a school and a mosque sit within a few minutes of nearly every home. Curiously, it is often the poorest quarters that come closest to the fifteen-minute ideal, because a shopkeeper who lives above the shop and a worker who walks to the factory cannot afford to be anywhere else. Where Dhaka fails is on the two harder tests: whether that proximity can be reached safely and with dignity, and whether it is genuinely shared.
Dhanmondi was planned largely as a residential neighbourhood, but its streets gradually filled with schools, clinics, banks and restaurants, while offices and shops emerged on residential plots in Gulshan and Banani. Image: Google Maps
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Dhanmondi was planned largely as a residential neighbourhood, but its streets gradually filled with schools, clinics, banks and restaurants, while offices and shops emerged on residential plots in Gulshan and Banani. Image: Google Maps
It is important to recognise the limits of costly solutions, because they shape what can realistically be achieved. The Metro Rail, the city’s proudest new asset, carries around 350,000 passengers on a normal day and has touched 400,000 at its busiest. Set against 38 million daily trips, that works out to roughly one journey in a hundred. Even once every planned line is built, years and many billions of dollars from now, independent assessments of the government’s own projections put metro rail at somewhere near eight per cent of all trips, while the URSTP itself targets under a fifth for public transport of every kind by 2045. The metro is worth having, but it will not, on its own, move Dhaka. The overwhelming majority of journeys will remain short, local and made on foot or by rickshaw for a long time yet.
It is tempting to say the metro will “solve” mobility, or to quote a comforting figure for how many millions it moves. The numbers do not support that comfort. What they support is something humbler and more useful: Dhaka’s core pattern of movement—short trips, mixed streets, walking and paratransit—is not going to be engineered away by rail. Studies of how people actually chain their daily journeys confirm the same thing. Most Dhaka residents travel by a single mode, predominantly walking or taking a rickshaw, stitching two or three local stops into one loop. Policy should build on that reality rather than try to reshape it around the model of a Western commute.
But the accidental compact city is not stable, and it is changing fast in the wrong direction. The bus system, which carried close to 29 per cent of trips in 2009, has collapsed to around 9 per cent, hollowed out by fragmented ownership and cut-throat competition on the road. Into that vacuum has rushed the motorcycle, whose share has roughly tripled in under a decade. The motorcycle is the compact city’s enemy in miniature. It allows people to live further from work, consumes road space that walking and cycling depend on, and normalises speed on streets where children still play.
At the same time, the green cover that makes density bearable keeps shrinking, while average road speeds have fallen from about 21 km/h in 2007 to walking pace.
With every year that passes without deliberate action, Dhaka moves closer to a sprawling, motorised and permanently congested future it can least afford. The advantage the city still possesses—proximity—is gradually being eroded. That is why the choices made now matter. Dhaka still has the foundations of a compact city: short trips, mixed-use neighbourhoods and a strong culture of walking. Planning should build on these strengths while they remain. Wait another decade, and the city may instead face the far more difficult and expensive task of reversing sprawl, as many Western cities are now attempting to do.
Metro rail is an important addition to Dhaka’s transport system, but even as the network expands, it will account for only a fraction of the city’s roughly 38 million daily trips.
Metro rail is an important addition to Dhaka’s transport system, but even as the network expands, it will account for only a fraction of the city’s roughly 38 million daily trips.