Restore Askar Dighi, revive Chattogram’s ecological memory
3 August 2026
In any civilised society, a historic reservoir such as Askar Dighi would have been protected as a public heritage asset. What can we do today?
3 August 2026
The moral calculus of footpath evictions in Dhaka
27 April 2026
The footpaths of Dhaka have again become a political flashpoint of late.
27 April 2026
The promises and perils of a ‘Notun Tej’ in Bangladeshi architecture
28 February 2026
Nearly a hundred years ago, in 1927, something “revolutionary” happened in Stuttgart, Germany.
28 February 2026
What does ‘good history’ look like?
4 November 2025
No historian should be able to answer the question on good history without a degree of trepidation, ambivalence, and uncertainty.
4 November 2025
Bangladesh’s eunomia problem
10 January 2025
In the ancient Greek society, eunomia outlined how things should be in an ideal society.
10 January 2025
Shamsul Wares: A teacher who inspired generations of architects
21 June 2024
Aristotle once said, “Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach.” Shamsul Wares understood, and hence taught.
21 June 2024
Faujdarhat Cadet College / A post-Partition heritage campus worth preserving
25 May 2024
FCC should not be viewed simply as one of the cadet colleges; it is a heritage campus that can be showcased to the world.
25 May 2024
What if a 7.9 Richter-scale earthquake hit Dhaka?
The runway of Dhaka’s international airport was torn asunder along the axis. The damage forced all international flights—carrying emergency medical supplies, food, temporary shelters, and heavy-duty rescue machines—to divert to Chittagong and Sylhet.
21 September 2020
Discrimination by design
I was reading a harrowing report in the New York Times that revealed startling data about how federal officials in the United States during the 1930s demarcated or “redlined” certain areas of different cities as “hazardous” or “risky for business,” based on the concentration of poor Black people or immigrants in them.
15 September 2020
To remove or not to remove?
Lincoln Park is our community hub on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Just a block away from where we have lived for nearly two decades, it is a magnificent swath of urban green, within walking distance from the US Capitol.
20 July 2020
How can Dhaka become more resilient to future pandemics?
Cities have generally been the epicentres of the devastation caused by Covid-19, fuelling debates around the world on how to make cities more resilient against future pandemics.
15 June 2020
Not rewarding honesty is promoting dishonesty
It is hard not to notice the frozen posture of BUET engineer MD Delwoar Hossain’s murdered body on the bank of the Turag river.
22 May 2020
Density is not the problem – lack of public health and social justice is
In America, one of the politically charged reactions to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has been the denigration of urban population density.
7 May 2020
Adieu, Architect Bashirul Haq
A Bangladeshi pioneer departed this world on Saturday, April 4, 2020. Architect Bashirul Haq was a poet who crafted his poems with the language of brick, green, light, air, and tactility.
5 April 2020
Bangabandhu and the Bengal Delta
It is fascinating that Bangabandhu began his Unfinished Memoirs (published in 2012) with an existential characterisation of his birthplace in geographic relationship to a river: the Madhumati river, which divides or connects the two southern districts of Faridpur and Khulna.
19 March 2020
Who is really responsible for the coronavirus pandemic?
As the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19 spreads rapidly across the world, we now face another dimension of the “globalisation and its discontents” argument.
9 March 2020
Changing the shy world of adolescent girls
Back in 2017, we had an opportunity to build a small and experimental toilet in Jhalokati, with the simple intention of helping adolescent girls in a rural school who had no real toilet to avail.
13 February 2020
Why BRAC should transform its experience into knowledge
I first met Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in 2012 at an invitation-only meeting in Washington, DC.
25 January 2020
What makes a city inspiring?
As part of a class assignment last semester a group of architecture students asked me a question: what makes a city inspiring?
1 January 2020
A tribute to Rabiul Husain: Our beloved poet-architect
If you are passing by Farmgate, you are most likely to notice a boxy brick building at the intersection of Airport Road and Khamar Bari Road.
5 December 2019
Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn visit Dhaka
At a public place in the afterlife, Louis Kahn ran into Le Corbusier. The Franco-Swiss architect was pleased to see the esoteric architect/guru from Philadelphia.
5 November 2019
The democracy of public squares
I have long wondered why cities in Bangladesh don’t have vibrant, dedicated public places or squares, in the sense of Taksim Square in Istanbul, Trafalgar Square in London,
29 October 2019
Why not a national footpath policy?
Population density in cities like Dhaka and Chattogram is daunting.
29 September 2019
Will the metro rail solve Dhaka’s traffic apocalypse?
Hope is high that when Metro Rail Transit (MRT) finally arrives in Dhaka, the capital city’s legendary traffic congestion will ease off.
2 September 2019
Bolai, Avatar, and our environment
The other day I was going from Chattogram to my ancestral village in the Chandanish upazila, located about 40km southeast from the city centre. As soon as I crossed the Karnafuli River a common scene along the road began to haunt me. Felled trees were stacked up on both sides of the road, to be processed locally or transported to lumber mills on the outskirts of cities. The continuity of the spectacle revealed the enormity of scale in tree cutting. It felt as if a full-scale war on nature—a kind of “ecocide”—was going on.
15 July 2019
The calculus of heritage preservation
The clandestine demolition of Jahaj Bari in Old Dhaka on the night of Eid-ul-Fitr reveals the precarious state of historic preservation in Bangladesh.
24 June 2019
Debunking the smart-city myth
I have been following the “smart city” conversation in Bangladesh for quite some time now. Last year I sat on a panel to discuss the topic during what was called the “smart-city week” in Dhaka. As Bangladesh urbanises rapidly, as mid-sized cities increasingly become its new urban frontier, the mayors of small towns across the country seem drawn to the idea of smart city. They frequently talk about how they are eager to transform their towns into smart cities. I myself spoke with a few mayors who sounded anxious to bring “smartness” to their towns.
27 May 2019