How community ownership gave Mohakhali's neglected pond a second life

The monsoon has been washing Dhaka almost every day this year. Roads turn into shallow canals, drains overflow, and neighbourhoods become heavily waterlogged. 

The flooding is a reminder of how the city has lost many of the ponds and wetlands that once absorbed rainwater. 

At Mohakhali's Institute of Public Health (IPH), however, one such pond has been brought back to life. 

At around 4pm, after a heavy downpour, three young urban designers—Shuvo, Adiba, and Tahmid—arrive at the pond to revisit a project they spent the past year restoring. The 70-year-old pond, once devastated by years of neglect, has since been transformed into a thriving waterbody.

Although the restoration was completed some time ago, they still return regularly to check on the gardens and native plants they introduced. Shuvo breaks into a smile, pointing to the surrounding fence. "Look how far the Aparajita vines have climbed!"

Nearby, a group of officials from WaterAid is touring the site. The organisation initiated the restoration with funding from the Embassy of Sweden in Bangladesh and is now assessing what has made this 1.2-acre pond stand out from so many other urban waterbodies.

By late afternoon, as the light begins to soften, the neighbourhood arrives.

Women and children gather along the walkway — talking, gossiping, letting the evening pass. 

The pond, surrounded by the tin-shed houses of IPH staff, a mess, and the nearby Sattola slum, was once used by thousands of people for their daily chores while serving the institution. 

Over the years, however, it became heavily polluted and turned into a dumping ground for waste from Mohakhali market and nearby households.

"It resulted in biodiversity loss, the uncontrolled growth of water hyacinths, and eventually a loss of ownership among the surrounding community as the water quality and physical structure deteriorated," said Shuvo, lead designer of the restoration project. 

Even after multiple restoration efforts carried out by several organisations earlier, the neighbourhoods say, the pond was still drowning. 

A neglected pond in the heart of the city 

Long before the IPH existed, the low-lying land around Mohakhali was part of a wider wetland system. When the institute was established in 1953, a pond was excavated on the site, primarily for safety and water-supply reasons. 

"At that time, the institution produced tetanus injections and oral saline. We also produced distilled water required for saline. There was a distilled-water plant. The pond was excavated to provide water in case of a fire during production," recalls Md Kamal Hossain, a lab assistant at IPH who has watched the site evolve for decades.

The pond grew alongside the institution's needs. Md Nazim Uddin, a community mobiliser at Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK) who grew up in the area, recalls a period when cattle were kept nearby for smallpox vaccine production, and the pond was expanded to provide water and bathing space for the animals. It was also used for the institution's boiler operations. 

"This is precisely the failure the project was designed to avoid. Dhaka has no shortage of cleaning drives. Almost none of them last, because the people living beside the water were never asked to be part of keeping it clean in the first place. Projects have to be implemented on the idea of community empowerment. Otherwise it becomes out of place. It will not last." Shaidujjaman Shuvo, Lead designer

Rethinking restoration 

When WaterAid set out to revive the neglected pond, it launched a competition, asking young professionals to imagine how an urban wetland could be brought back to life. 

The competition called for more than a cleaning plan, which repeatedly failed. 

It wanted proposals that included biodiversity restoration, community participation, gender-responsive design, and the possibility of replicating successful ideas elsewhere in the city. 

Among around 40 submissions, Team Water-Yard emerged as the winner. The five-member team brought together architecture students Shaidujjaman Shuvo and Adiba Zaman from BUET, Tahmid Rana Khan from MIST, microbiology student Nahiduzzaman Shadhin of Dhaka University, and water resources engineering student Himel Moulik from BUET.

Competing as Team Water-Yard, the five-member team won the competition with its proposal to reconnect the community with the pond. 

Before drawing a single sketch, the team spent time observing the pond and the people around it. 

"Once you invest in removing water hyacinths, it comes back again. There have always been many initiatives to clean it. They clean it, and then it becomes dirty again," says Adiba.

The central conclusion was not simply waste. It was the absence of ownership. 

Small pockets of land that could have become gathering spaces had instead become dumping grounds, because no one had ever been given a reason to treat them otherwise.

From that, Shuvo came up with the idea "Water Yard", or Panir Uthan, a water courtyard. 

The concept draws on the traditional South Asian courtyard, where shared space anchors everyday life. It extends the community's everyday spaces towards the pond instead of treating it as something separate and distant. 

Former backyards would become active frontyards, turning the pond into a shared yard rather than a boundary.

"There was a natural pattern, the way people had made a place for themselves in their own way," says Tahmid. "The place was not organised. There was dirt and rubbish, but they still wanted to keep it in their own way." The design, he says, was never meant to erase that instinct, only to give it structure. 

The plan divided the pond's edge into multiple zones. A children's play and fishing deck, a purposeful-plantation zone, a biodiversity zone left largely to nature, and common decks connecting it all through an elevated walkway. 

Around these spaces, a phased ecological plan was developed. 

The first step was to preserve biodiversity. The next was to reintroduce riparian and wetland plants. 

Eventually, the plan aimed to establish a fuller, multilayered ecosystem around the pond. 

A community-led revival 

"A winning design, however, was only half the task. The harder part was building trust with the people who actually lived beside the pond," said Shuvo.

The restoration took place in three phases: restoring the pond, designing and zoning the spaces through community participation, and creating a system that could be sustained over time.

To make that possible, WaterAid Bangladesh and Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK) worked with Shuvo and his team to engage residents directly. 

They held community gatherings, listened to concerns and formed a community-based group to give the neighbourhood a formal role in the project rather than making residents passive beneficiaries.

"The community was not simply informed about the design. They decided where sitting decks would be placed, what plants they wanted to grow and who would plant the trees and maintain them," added Shuvo.

Floating treatment wetlands were introduced to naturally improve the pond’s water quality as part of the restoration process. 

The restoration itself remained entirely nature-based. "We did not want any chemical restoration. Instead, we installed floating treatment wetlands, which naturally help restore the water. Cleaning is one process, but it doesn't necessarily mean restoration. If you remove the dirt, there will be more dirt again," said Shuvo.

To support the natural treatment process, the team introduced plants such as spider plants, kachu and kolabati, while the sitting decks and ghats were built with local materials. 

The structures were designed to respect the pond's ecological buffer, with some common decks and others adjacent to nearby households. A separate zone was also created for useful plants as part of the project's broader biodiversity conservation plan.

With the IPH authorities' approval, the design took physical shape. Awareness boards were installed, and the area was cleaned in a way intended to be sustained rather than repeated every few months.

Safety also became an important part of the restoration. Nazim says two children had died in the pond in years past, so swimming and fishing were prohibited even as the space around the water was opened up.

People own the pond now

For the team Water-Yard, the most meaningful change is the shift in how people speak about the pond. Residents once referred to it simply as "the IPH pond", a name that placed ownership firmly with an institution, not with the people who lived beside it. That is beginning to change.

Women and children gather along the pond walkway, turning the restored space into an evening gathering place. 

Neighbours now sit by the water when the electricity goes out. One resident says the surroundings have simply become pleasant enough to sit in, where before they were too muddy to bother with. 

"This is precisely the failure the project was designed to avoid. Dhaka has no shortage of cleaning drives. Almost none of them last, because the people living beside the water were never asked to be part of keeping it clean in the first place. Projects have to be implemented on the idea of community empowerment. Otherwise it becomes out of place. It will not last," noted Shuvo.