Metro magic and the charms of development

Dhaka greeted the new year with the country's first metro – the first of six planned Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) lines promising to revolutionise how we get around the city. Despite the "soft" opening (restricted hours, no intermediary stops) and a seemingly rushed and electorally-timed inauguration, almost 4,000 people rode the metro on the first day in just four short hours, queuing up in lines stretching to half a kilometre. 

Interestingly (and understandably, given the partial opening), most of these early visitors appear to have been tourists, many of them middle class families with children who had come to share in the experience of this new addition to their city.

Reading through testimonials from news reports, I came across a little vignette in The Daily Star that reminded me of how, growing up in the 90s, I took every opportunity to ride the escalators at Hatirpool's Eastern Plaza: "Finally, we got the tickets. The line was long, the wait even longer... but it was worth it!" 

I recognise my delight at Eastern Plaza now as the uniquely "elevating" experience of the modern. The escalators too, just like the metro, required learning; but once you did learn how to glide up those magical stairs, the city outside seemed very far "behind" indeed.

I bring this up to suggest that the magic of "development" is something we can dismiss too easily; hardly surprising given the kinds of policies/politics that can lead to it. To critics, this fanfare – like the entire package of megaproject-led development – may appear like a political spectacle. The fervour surrounding the metro's inauguration have been met in many quarters with disdain. Yet, if all this is the naivety of "irrational" crowds, why does it sustain so well?

Answering this requires us to take the magic of development seriously. The first riders of the metro spoke in rapturous terms of dreams coming true. These are dreams of elevation and escape, an experience powered by what they can now leave behind: the constant state of war that is Dhaka's streets. It is not an accident that a very similar promise – that of escaping the struggles of Dhaka – was invoked during the inauguration itself.

Undoubtedly, these are class aspirations of a neoliberal age (indeed, the fixation with "solving" traffic and the neglect of housing, utilities, sewage, etc betrays the classist nature of the "problem" of Dhaka); yet they are nevertheless real, and powerful. That is perhaps why accusations of corruption and wastage – shared features of megaprojects the world over – rarely seem to make an impact. Perhaps what matters most is the simple fact that the metro now exists, as a tangible reality and promise. 

And that is how development works its magic: by the futures that it projects, and the shadows that those futures cast on the past and present. As with the Padma Bridge, the allure of the metro depends just as much on what it helps us escape from. 

So which (and whose) Dhaka is the metro helping us escape from, and why? Development's power lies in illuminating certain realities while shrouding others, turning possibilities into inevitabilities. Whatever else the metro does, we can be sure that it will stop us from looking elsewhere and asking why we should be leaving anything behind.

Our planners, for one, are not oblivious. The Revised Strategic Transport Plan (2015-2035) recommends not only MRTs, BRTs (Bus Rapid Transit) and elevated expressways, but also water transport and bus route franchising. Yet only half-hearted efforts were attempted with the "water bus", even though people were willing to use it, and the Hatirjheel water taxi service was a success. In the land of development, the road and the bridge are king, while water and rail can only look on in envy. The BRT project has already taken a toll without offering any fundamental restructuring, and route franchising remains a chimera.

The perverse flipside of the metro's promise, however, is that all we can do with Dhaka now is escape it. It paints a picture of a city simultaneously on the brink of utopia and dystopia, an urban apocalypse whose air will always be thick, and whose roads a war zone. And it is precisely because of how commonsensical this picture is becoming that we need to be suspicious of it. The paradox of Dhaka's transport crisis is that everyone seems to know how to "solve" a problem that is only growing more entrenched and intractable, suggesting that perhaps we are not dealing with a merely "technical" problem at all.

Despite the tremendous investments in roads and bridges (and the clout of the corresponding agencies/ministries), great swathes of Dhaka's roads remain barely usable. Despite having an agency mandated with regulating things like bus route permits (the Dhaka Transport Coordination Authority), it is an arcane body called the Regional Transport Committee that has de facto reign, presided over primarily by traffic police and Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) personnel. 

Hardly surprising, then, that the city's most important mode of mass transport – the bus system – behaves more like a nexus of private competition and accumulation, with owners and politicians taking advantage of its significance as an economic conduit for aspiring working-class people with nothing to fall back on. I suppose it is much easier just to build another flyover and leave the city to fend for itself.

Yes, it is a good thing that Dhaka now has a metro. But I worry that this could mark, not a radical re-visioning of the city, but a reinvigorated effort to "bypass" it altogether – like a moving satellite town in the sky. The promise of escaping the struggles of Dhaka may naturalise those very struggles, turning the city into some kind of monster that exceeds our grasps. 

If the movements around road safety have taught us anything, however, it is that this monster is a social and political arrangement – the mirror image of our collective alienation from the means of getting by. This same arrangement also undergirds the very plans and projects that are supposed to save us, meaning that only by claiming our right to the city and facing this arrangement head on, can we hope to be free of the spell.

Shehzad M Arifeen is Senior Lecturer (on study leave) at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences at Brac University.