More walls, less safety: Rethinking how Dhaka protects itself

Every parent in Dhaka has heard the same advice, usually from their own mother, now repeated to their children. Do not talk to strangers. Do not linger in the lane. Come straight home. 

It sounds like protection. It might be doing the opposite.

In 1961, the urban thinker Jane Jacobs made an argument that still unsettles anyone who hears it for the first time. In her study of American cities, she wrote that a street is not made safe by police, or walls, or gates. It is made safe by the ordinary, unplanned presence of people who have a reason to be there anyway, and who happen to be watching without ever meaning to. A shopkeeper glancing up from his till, a woman on a verandah, a rickshaw-puller waiting at his usual spot. 

Jacobs called this "eyes on the street", and her conclusion cut directly against instinct: a street full of strangers going about their business is safer than an empty one, not despite the strangers, but because of them.

It is tempting to hear this and feel a small thrill of recognition. Think of the old paras of Dhaka, the mixed-use lanes where the grocer knew every child by name, where someone was always half-watching from a first-floor window, where a mother could list, without pausing, exactly who was around when her child played outside.

Compare that to the new vertical societies rising across the city: gated, walled, guarded by a single hire at a single gate, ground floors surrendered to parking instead of shopfronts. A mother in one of these buildings, if asked the same question, often cannot name a single neighbour. More walls, less watching.

It is a clean story. It is also, on its own, not quite true.

Anyone who has lived in Dhaka long enough knows that crimes happen in broad daylight, on crowded footpaths, in front of dozens of people, and that dozens of people can watch and do nothing. This is not a failure of Jacobs's idea. It is the other half of it, one she did not fully reckon with, and one that Dhaka makes impossible to ignore.

In 1964, a young woman named Kitty Genovese was attacked in New York while, according to widely circulated reports at the time, numerous neighbours heard her cries and none intervened.

The case became the founding story of what psychologists now call the bystander effect: the more people present at an emergency, the less likely any single one of them is to act, because responsibility quietly divides itself among everyone and lands on no one. Presence, it turns out, does not guarantee protection. Sometimes it guarantees paralysis.

So which is it? Do strangers make a street safe, or do they make it a place where harm goes unanswered? The honest answer is that both are true, and the difference between them is not the number of people on the street. It is what those people owe to the street.

Consider what actually separates a watcher from a bystander. The tea-stall owner who has sat on the same corner for fifteen years has something to protect that a passer-by does not: a reputation, a shopfront, a relationship with the families who will walk past him again tomorrow, and the day after that. If he looks away today, he still has to face this lane every morning.

A commuter cutting through on his way to somewhere else owes the street nothing. He will likely never pass this way again, and so he carries no cost for staying silent, and no particular claim to intervene even if he wished to. This is close to what the architect Oscar Newman argued a decade after Jacobs, in his idea of 'defensible space'. People protect territory they feel is theirs. They rarely protect territory they are merely passing through.

There is a second piece to this, quieter but just as important: legibility. On a lane with a small, known cast of daily characters, anything unusual stands out immediately, precisely because everyone knows what ordinary looks like there.

On a churning, anonymous commercial road, where the baseline is already noise and crowd and hurry, an actual emergency does not read as different from the everyday chaos. Nothing looks wrong, because nothing is expected to look calm in the first place.

Put together, the old paras of Dhaka and the new high-rise societies fail the same test from opposite directions. The high-rise has too little density, and what little it has is entirely anonymous. The chaotic, high-turnover commercial street has plenty of density, but almost none of it is rooted. Neither produces what a child or a woman actually needs, which is not simply people, and not simply walls, but people who will still recognise her face tomorrow.

This is, in the end, an uncomfortable thing to say to a city that has spent the last decade selling safety as a product. Gated entry. Boundary walls. A guard at the gate is paid to watch so that no one else has to. It is marketed as security, and it may in fact be manufacturing the very isolation it claims to solve, because a single paid watcher is a single point of failure in a way that forty ordinary, unpaid, half-attentive neighbours never were.

None of this is an argument against safety, or a naive call to fling open every gate. It is an argument for a different kind of safety altogether, one that cannot be bought in the form of a taller wall or a stricter guard. It has to be built the slower way, through shopfronts that face the lane instead of turning away from it, through daily rhythms that give people a reason to be present and a reason to care, through neighbourhoods designed to be lived on rather than merely passed through.

Dhaka does not need more strangers, and it does not need fewer of them either. It needs to ask, street by street, which of its strangers have anything at stake in the child playing in front of them, and which of them are simply on their way somewhere else.

Md Rafiqul Islam Tushar is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Architecture, Bangladesh University and a PhD Candidate at the Department of Architecture, BUET.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.