By Amy Kazmin in Dhaka
The tiny 150-year-old Jagannath Temple in Old Dhaka’s narrow Tati Bazaar, or gold market, was a Victorian gem, with an ornate facade and a graceful cupola. But last year, temple elders decided to rebuild the Hindu shrine to add apartments – a lucrative proposition given the city’s chronic housing shortage.
Architects Taimur Islam and Homaira Zaman, a husband-and-wife team campaigning to preserve Old Dhaka’s heritage buildings, begged the temple’s managing committee to save the building’s unique facade. The elders agreed – if the couple provided funds to reinforce the structure. But during the scramble to secure donations – not a quick task in Muslim-majority Bangladesh – the facade was demolished overnight.
Today, the shrine’s bare exterior – which resembles a garage, with only a poster as adornment – stands as painful evidence that the odds are stacked against saving the eclectic, 400-year-old architectural history of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital and the world’s most densely populated city.
“It’s now or never,” says Mr Islam. “In five years’ time, there will be nothing left.”
Conservationists have battled property developers across Asia for decades, as gracious old buildings and bustling neighbourhoods have been razed to make way for the glass-and-steel towers that define many modern Asian cities. These tensions are now roiling Dhaka, where population pressure and steady economic growth have sent property prices spiralling.
In their hunt for land, developers are eyeing Old Dhaka, which thrived as a commercial hub during the Moghul empire, flourished again during a late 19th-century revival, but which has been declining since the end of British colonial rule in 1947.
Bangladesh’s elites, ensconced in newer neighbourhoods, have traditionally paid little heed to Old Dhaka, with its mosques, temples, bazaars and ornate mansions originally built for wealthy Hindu families that later fled to India. Dhaka’s 1958 master-plan even spoke wistfully of the redevelopment potential if only authorities could “sweep away” the narrow lanes and ageing buildings.
“Old Dhaka had always been seen as a junkyard,” says Mr Islam.
But in 2004, an old building in Shakari Bazaar, famed for its traditional conch shell bangles, collapsed, killing 19 people. Criticised over the poor living conditions, officials proposed razing the entire bazaar to build 20-storey housing blocks. Mr Islam and Ms Zaman began a high-profile campaign to save architectural treasures slated for destruction.
“There is no contradiction between human safety and heritage preservation,” Mr Islam says. “Buildings like this have been preserved in every part of the world. Why can’t we do it?”
FT
(Submitted by reader)