<i>Expansion of the city</i>
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It's about time that Dhaka should go for vertical, instead of horizontal expansion. It is learnt from government and NGO statistics that the city has a population of 1.80 core, which is something one gets to see in developed cities like London, New York or Sydney. I have no actual figure of how much the Dhaka city is in square kilometres, but I can say it's about time that the people and the government think about expanding the city vertically. My suggestion to the people and the developers will be to start some sort of a commonwealth as far as the lands are concerned. Those who have lands ranging from 1-10 kathas should merge. This merger will give us enough space to build 25-35 storied residential buildings in a healthier environment. This will give us enough room to make 50-60 feet wide roads, easy movement of traffic, enough space for pavements and planting trees. The big question will be how to merge these small plot/land owners. This can be done by the government. A new law needs to be enacted, keeping in mind that a building is shared among the landowners according to the land they own. This is certainly debatable but for the sake of the city and the country, I believe this or a similar idea can be implemented. If this can be done, we can have a city where the roads are like a grid and one can commute to another place without too much problem as far as the traffic is concerned. To start with, the government will have to stop all land sale & purchase and stop all construction which is going on, especially in the western and eastern parts of the city by land filling. For the readers' information, the so-called new residential areas don't have space for footpaths and the roads are not wide enough for vehicles, especially for the emergency services like ambulance and fire-brigade trucks. This sounds easy, but will certainly need a lot of funding, demolition and construction. This is for our future generation and we, the present generation, will have to sacrifice a bit for them. The planned city expansion will also increase foreign investment in the country.
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