The two megacities Kolkata and Dhaka lie in the core of the world’s biggest Delta. What does the strong interdependence between human settlements and water mean to the inhabitants of these 14-million metropolises? To which risks are they prone? And by which measures do the two cities, which share similar geographic location and common cultural roots, tackle the challenges of urbanisation? HFB curated this issue of StadtBauwelt in order to promote a dialogue between practitioners and researchers of two cities whose similarities have rarely been thematised in the last 50 years. Urbanists, architects and publicists from both cities and Germany focused on two aspects of Kolkata and Dhaka’s “flow”. On the one hand, a compelling housing crisis concerns all social/income groups, but has clearly devastating implications for the poor. On the other, the struggle of planners as well as inhabitants to use, control and live with water is addressed. To the contributions in English…
StadtBauwelt 192, 48.11, with contributions by Elisa Bertuzzo, Boris Braun, Partha Das, Keya DasGupta, Günter Nest, Mahbub Rahman, Salma A. Shafi, Christina Zeiske. Berlin: Bauwelt Verlag.