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Urbanization is considered a sign of advancement. Skyscrapers, transportation networks, and digital lines of communication are often regarded as symbols of progress. But behind these shiny facades, more than 1 billion people in the world live in slums characterized by deprivation, the UN Statistics Division says. From Kibera in Nairobi to Dharavi in Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, slums remind us that rapid urban expansion is not synonymous with better living conditions.

Photo by the Author The Rohingya crisis is not a new tragedy; it is a recurring wound in the conscience of South and Southeast Asia. For generations, the Rohingya people, an ethnic Muslim minority native to Myanmar’s Rakhine State, have lived as a community stripped of belonging. The crisis deepened in August 2017 when a brutal military operation in Rakhine drove over 700,000 Rohingya across the Naf River into Bangladesh. It was not the first exodus; smaller waves had occurr

Part 1 The Status Quo: A Broken System It’s hard to ignore the cracks that are starting to show in the picture of “advancement” that...

By a Citizen Who Walked the Streets and Read the Skies I remember the smell of tear gas more vividly than the monsoon that came three...

It was like any other day in July, scorching hot in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A schoolyard was just about to fill with the noisy chatting of...

Urban sustainability has emerged as a dominant framework for designing and evaluating city environments. But is it a genuine solution to...

A Boy in the Heat It is late July, and Dhaka feels like a city on fire. In a narrow lane of Sutrapur, twelve-year-old Rafiq tries to...

Part 2 As I argued in the first part of the theory on Natural Rights Led Governance (NRLG), the Development–Destruction Trap exposes how...