What does ‘good history’ look like?
No historian should be able to answer the question on good history without a degree of trepidation, ambivalence, and uncertainty.
4 November 2025, 04:00 AM
Bangladesh’s eunomia problem
In the ancient Greek society, eunomia outlined how things should be in an ideal society.
10 January 2025, 02:00 AM
Shamsul Wares: A teacher who inspired generations of architects
Aristotle once said, “Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach.” Shamsul Wares understood, and hence taught.
21 June 2024, 05:00 AM
Faujdarhat Cadet College / A post-Partition heritage campus worth preserving
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, 02:00 AM
Planning for Dhaka's new night
Dhaka should be readied for a nighttime culture that offers a potpourri of entertainment options to people.
17 May 2024, 01:00 AM
Has Dhaka become a status city?
The status city often serves the privileged, while the huddling masses eke out a minimal existence
26 January 2024, 02:00 AM
Is human civilisation at an inflection point?
Our brains are being reprogrammed to look for the easiest solutions to our most vexing social and political questions.
1 December 2023, 02:00 AM
Is there an architecture for marginal communities?
Our experience of designing Brac regional offices across rural Bangladesh.
2 October 2023, 02:00 AM
Researching Rural Transformation 2.0 in Bangladesh
We need new research methodologies to understand the complex nature of the rural change in Bangladesh in the last two decades.
10 November 2022, 14:00 PM
Mid-sized cities are our new urban frontier
A resilient and adjustable urban development policy for mid-sized cities is necessary to decentralise Dhaka.
30 October 2022, 18:30 PM
Rural Bangladesh needs next-generation village roads
The streets of rural Bangladesh should value the safety and wellbeing of its users.
15 September 2022, 14:00 PM
How has rural Bangladesh transformed in the last 20 years?
Ever since the 1980s-90s, our typical perception of a rural village has been changing.
16 August 2022, 10:53 AM
Understanding Rural Transformation 2.0 in Bangladesh
The traditional mental image of rural Bangladesh that we have is no longer a reality.
5 August 2022, 14:00 PM
Bangladeshi architecture at the MoMA in New York: What it means for us
The exhibition can serve as a potent reminder for our ethical responsibility to preserve the mid-century buildings that tell our stories.
14 July 2022, 14:00 PM
There is just one way to save Dhaka
The notoriety of Dhaka’s traffic is now daily news. Civil society members have been venting frustration about this maddening crisis.
24 May 2022, 18:00 PM
Padma Bridge is a metaphorical countermovement
Recently, on a wintry afternoon, I went to see the Padma Bridge.
3 February 2022, 18:00 PM
A time travel to Dhaka University’s 2034 convocation
It was Titian Matin’s first return to his native Bangladesh after he won the Nobel Prize in economics for his study of the reciprocal relationship between urban density and economic geography.
27 January 2022, 18:00 PM
Understanding a freedom fighter’s prison letters
Imprisoned in various torture chambers by the Pakistan Army during Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971, Mohiuddin Ahmed, MP, wrote numerous letters to his wife, describing the systemic cruelties of his oppressors.
20 December 2021, 18:00 PM
Is smart density the way forward for Bangladesh?
Going around in Dhaka could be overwhelming. The city seems overburdened with the impossible weight of people, buildings, vehicles, rickshaws, noise, carbon emission, and nonstop activities.
29 November 2021, 18:00 PM
Tribute to a true admirer of Bangladesh
Mary Frances Dunham (MFD) arrived in Dhaka on a wintry day in November of 1960. From the window of her room at Hotel Shahbagh, she found ample opportunities to observe the city.
19 October 2021, 18:00 PM
The delicate work of decolonising knowledge
In recent years, the idea of “decolonising knowledge” (DK)—that knowledge creation must be liberated from West-centric and racialised views of the world—has become a bottom-up intellectual movement in Western academia.
4 October 2021, 18:00 PM
Could public consciousness of history be a measure of social progress?
For quite some time now, people have been discussing if there are more on-the-ground, inclusive ways to measure a country’s progress, rather than supra-quantitative metrics like GDP.
6 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Chattogram desperately needs guardian angels
It is impossible these days to not notice Chattogram’s spectacular urban decline. Go around the port city and you will only experience a place plagued by anemia, chaos, a collective greed to commercialise every open space, and overall, a curious lack of aspiration.
18 August 2021, 18:00 PM
The sociology of eco-grief: Saving Suhrawardy Udyan
Eight years ago, in May, a large crowd staged a sit-in at Gezi Park, next to Taksim Square, Istanbul’s bustling public plaza in the downtown of its European side.
17 May 2021, 18:00 PM
Your land is my land: Environmental injustice in Bandarban
Land is the closest thing that we know. We cultivate it, build on it, transform it to meet our needs, commercialise it to maximise economic gain, and derive our identities from its widely varying geographic characters.
8 May 2021, 18:00 PM
How about experiential indicators of wellbeing?
That gross domestic product (GDP) is not a fully satisfying measure of a country’s progress is no longer news. The awareness of GDP’s inadequacies in revealing a nation’s state of development is now almost mainstream.
5 April 2021, 18:00 PM
Memories, cultural imaginations and Dhaka
How do cities like Dhaka in the throes of frenzied development deal with memories and literary depictions in the process of their transformations?
8 February 2021, 18:00 PM
How the demolition of a train station changed America
At the heart of the ongoing debate on the potential demolition of TSC and Kamalapur Railway Station in Dhaka is an old philosophical dilemma—how to progress while retaining some loyalty to history, a key concern of many 20th century philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur.
28 December 2020, 18:00 PM