There is one more morphology, invisible and unrecognized yet vital to the visible city, a morphology that spreads out across Dhaka, weaving in and out of the first five morphologies, along the railways tracks, on the sidewalks and the flood dams, eked out by fresh migrants, vagrants, and generally by people at the periphery of planning. This last morphology is housing.

Housing is the fabric of a city. How one defines and conceives housing is finally how one sees cities, and vice-versa. Housing is not just a numerical and fiscal matter; it speaks to the quality of life for individual citizens and the city at large. And yet housing is Dhaka's greatest failure.

Dhaka's chaotic condition results from the lack of large-scale residential models suitable to its many different communities. Unlike in New Delhi and Karachi, whose financial and social resources are similar to Dhaka's, the Bangladeshi capital's public sector housing, which caters to government and corporation employees, has no innovative models for collective urban living. The designs of public housing, which utilize generic, "modern" planning strategies, have simply not given adequate attention to the particular and changing cultural and social dimensions of grouping. Moreover, Dhaka's limited and lower income groups have been completely ignored in residential planning efforts.

In short, housing and planning experts have been unable to provide any vision of how the people of Dhaka should live as a group in new or even renovated urban conditions. The planners are still floundering about with two outdated and questionable models: the individual plot with the independent bungalow-style house, and the individual plot with a clunky apartment building. Such "planning" strategy basically involves parceling fresh land, often acquired from agricultural fields, and dividing it numerically into plots without much thought for the formation of a cohesive community fabric.

In fact, Dhaka has seen a gradual deterioration of its communities. This is seen vividly in the collapse of the idea of the mohollas and the urban cohesion that they provided. The spatial matrix of the earlier mohollas ­ the network of streets, the link of community spaces, and the nature of house types allowed for a particular kind of social mixture and cohesion. Now, Dhaka has become a city of fragments, broken down to individual households living in their walled enclaves. It is a curious matter that the biggest investment in the city is walls and fences.

Why is the question of morphology critical? In the absence of other contemporary urban paradigms in Bangladesh, Dhaka city is the sole model, the city par excellence for the country. Every small town, every nook and corner of the country wishes to mimic this urban behemoth. The future of Bangladesh depends on what is made of Dhaka city.