Post-apocalypse Dhaka?

WE had a cracking storm last night. I was out foraging for dinner and felt the pressure suddenly drop. A cold breeze rushed past, a foreshock of the coming storm. I made it to a pizza place and settled in by the door, where the mosquitoes cracked on the bug killer when they weren’t trying to fly up my trousers. Very soon the lighting burst, great sheets of madness. It was a proper storm. I had five other people sheltering at my table, drookit with their motorcycle helmets, and worried about their appointments. We had coffee together and talked about various things. After a half-hour or so it was done. The power was gone across Dhaka; even the internet routers were down on the mobile data providers. SMS worked.

Late that night the news updated. 6 dead within Dhaka city; but in Nepal, at least 31, with many more injured. Storms had rolled across the region: boats capsized, lightning struck children playing, bricks flew off buildings and killed rickshaw-wallas, and in Nepal the storm just crushed houses.

But what struck me was something quite small. There was another disaster just a few days ago here. As my colleagues say, there are no natural disasters: there are economic and political acts that force people into vulnerable positions. A tall building here in Dhaka caught fire, and many people died. There have been more horrible fires here just in the past few months, but this building, the FR tower, is right on a main road in Banani. 25 people are know to be dead. In order to do my business here, I have walked past it several times. Each time there is a crowd of people gathered on the pavement opposite, staring at the obscene remainders.

Reports now suggest that (1) corruption played a major role in this disaster — the building was built several floors higher than the original design, there was inadequate fire safety infrstructure, and so on and (2) the structure of the building is compromised: the pillars and girders are cracked, bent and tilting. This is, of course, reminiscent of the Grenfell Tower disaster in London in many ways.

But the small thing is this. I walked home through the blackout last night, along Kemal Ataturk Road where the FR tower is. At first I thought it had hailed. The rain was mostly finished and the wind had calmed, but something was crunching underfoot. I bent down to peer in the blackness: it was broken glass, a whole snowfall of broken glass, blown (I presume) from the carcass of the FR tower along the boulevard. (I sincerely hope no one was struck by this hard shower.) And I thought to myself: all our visions of post-apocalyptic cities are wrong. They are not durable engineering marvels that will shelter relict populations. They are corrupted: the buildings will burn, tilt, crack, subside. They were each made by corporations who cut every corner they could. At the scale of city buildings, there is corruption in every jurisdiction worldwide. For centuries after civilisation collapses, they will be deathtraps, not refugia. The layered dystopia of Blade Runner or 5th Element are too idealistic.

And they know this here. In response to the inevitable years of enquiry (the initial enquiry on the FR tower is planned to last 150 days) the metropolitan authorities are building a shelter to protect us from the rotting carcass of the tower as it sheds windows, trim, ash, detritus. You can see it in this photo: for the past few two days as I have walked by there have been welders working furiously to erect a roof over the road that will protect us.

In Chittagong we are building seawalls against the rising sea. In Dhaka they roof over a road to protect it from a decomposing building. These are pragmatic, locally driven responses to the organic collapse of urban sites in the face of multiple interlocked stresses: economic, ecological, political. When we thought about cities, did we imagine them being rotten from corruption and kleptocracy in their very structure, and battered by increasingly violent weather events from the outside?

So what will the post-apocalyptic city look like? Will there be a dense layer of anthropogenic rubble, with hospitable jungles on top—like the Amazon shell mound cities—and the occasional cave leading down into the porous interior of formica, computer chairs, concrete beams and private parking signs? Will it simply be a vast sponge of junk/vegetation/plastic-eating fungi? I think we are too caught up in the hubris of our ‘civilisation’ to see. But no vision of the future city is worth developing without recognising, clearly, how deeply corrupt, how oppressive, how fragile they really are.