What if density is not the evil it is often cited to be? Cities by their very nature are the epitome of human interactions and innovations; and in doing so, they have made a remarkable contribution to improving the state of our lives and communities. No other platform enables a critical mass of humans to interact, work and live in close proximity, and to generate innovation, creation and collaboration on a large scale as cities do. For all these to function properly, density is a key factor.

George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist directed the famous Grant Study^[1][2] from 1972 to 2004 to understand the secrets to happiness and a fulfilling life. The study shows that embracing social connections helps us live longer, and be happier. It concluded that the core of human happiness lies in these interactions and relationships. The question is: How do we enter this world of interactions? How do we meet people beyond our family and neighbours?

It is cities that offer us the opportunity to belong to several communities at one time. These opportunities often come randomly and serendipitously. Sometimes they also arise through organised formality which is perhaps the beauty of large formal groups or fraternities. Whether random or formal, accidental or organized, all these are very much conditions of the urban phenomenon. 

It is often argued that a fast paced urban lifestyle is killing human interactions. The opposite also might be true, as we in one way or another belong to some large fraternities, perhaps an alumni group, club, neighborhood groups, pubs, coffee shops, fairs, festivals, or even international networks of organised communities. Communities that gather, exchange group messages virtually and physically, take up new initiatives, organise charity events, or put up protests. We might be hardly in close relationship with, for instance, two or three people of these large groups, but the possibility that these fraternities offer is important. A little event, a get-together, a picnic, an excursion, or a workshop possibly can add new close relationships with almost completely random people whom we would have otherwise never met. We have to agree that such modes of connections and relationships are made possible by the urban lifestyles that are offered and practiced in cities. Eventually this contributes to our overall happiness and well being, and arguably, happiness is what we are all pursuing. 

Cities offer the greatest opportunities of public interactions, Photo: Mohammad Tauheed

Population density plays a big role in the size, nature and diversity of these fraternities. The sheer number of random possible encounters at a coffee shop in Dhaka is incomparable to a small town in Northern Ontario, and it is because of the density of the place. Often people talk about the charm of knowing everyone in a town or neighbourhood. We fantasise the past for this, however, in the long run, it may not assure happiness! A small town of tightly woven communities offers little individual freedom, and much less random encounters which could lead to new meaningful relationships.

The idea of going back to the isolation of nature sounds magical, but it miserably fails when it comes to human interactions. You can fancy a vacation in a remote island for a few weeks, but settling there would not necessarily make you happier. There is also a good chance that it wouldn’t help the environment either. Every new settlement on every new island in history alters the ecosystems forever, often bringing development which results in extensive damage. Commonly-known examples include Madagascar^[3][4] and Australia^[5] where human settlement wiped out about 90% of the big mammals of both these islands in just a few years of humans settling in. 

For many of us, cities are the future, and they can be good for the environment and us, if we know how to design them well. How? Concentrate, form tightly knitted diverse clusters, avoid sprawls, and think about how to foster more and more of this uniquely urban phenomenon, the new fraternities.

Density makes possible public transportation, mobile networks, Internet, water and sanitation facilities, and human interactions to be more efficient. Never before did we know how dense is unbearably dense, until Dhaka happened. This city is the fastest growing, densest city on earth. Interestingly enough, Dhaka is not sprawling that fast as it is ‘growing’; it is rather growing in density, and not quite in physical size. Such a condition brings in some inherent problems which are possible to be solved. 

Photo: Mohammad Tauheed

We need to stop pandering to the idea of decentralisation and reduction of density as a solution to all our problems. We have to give density a chance. Embrace it for a few more decades, see where it takes us. We never knew mobile phone service can be this dirt cheap, serving this huge number people using the same infrastructure. We didn’t know that it is possible to supply water to fifteen million inhabitants using only about 2000 km long pipelines charging only 6.6 Taka ($0.08 USD) per cubic meter (1000 litres)^[6]. Dhaka WASA has about 300,000 domestic and commercial connections. This may seem low, but in most of the areas of Dhaka, each connection may serve up to 1,000 households. The magic behind this, is density. If keeping our ‘footprint’ small on the planet is a concern, why don’t we take the idea literally, and pack ourselves in places that is as dense as the future technology allows us to be? Leave our rainforests and oceans to flourish and regenerate, and function as the lungs that our sick planet needs, and be the spaces that animals need. In that way, the natural conditions will be there when we need them too.

The radical New York urbanist Michael Sorkin in a conversation at Bengal Institute once said: “To cross the street in Dhaka is kind of a constant negotiation, as the traffic is slow, it is somewhat democratic and autonomous, it simply just works, without much of modernist controlled or rigorously zoned techniques. Every means of movement is isolated in the modern western cities. I find it problematic, they need to negotiate organically and find ways.” Renowned urban designer Gary Hack made the point quoting a model designed by the famed Dutch architecture practice BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), that in near future we do not have to segregate and control the vehicles and pedestrians anymore; autonomous vehicles can simply find their ways automatically, in a pseudo-organic fashion. That would bring back the belongingness and ownership of the city to its citizens. We want to walk, and we want to walk freely, everywhere. Moreover in a highly dense mixture of urban clusters, we all want to walk to work, shop, play, learn and live. We want to walk keeping our heads high, and not looking for zebra crossings or pedestrian signals. As pedestrians, we set our own rules of walking about. Let the vehicles find their ways on their own, make them intelligent enough to leave us alone freely enjoying a walk. That’s the future city we would like to head to.

Photo: Mohammad Tauheed

Half of the world’s population is now living in cities. Many fear mongering “think-tankers’ are busy making headlines describing this as our biggest problem. We should rather be focusing on creating densely efficient yet green and happy urban clusters. Living, working, production and interaction should happen within a few walkable blocks of cities. The cost of rent in the city-center versus commuting cost from the periphery is a constant battle. We should focus more into creating autonomous, dense clusters of various mixes, rather than a centralised CBD and far away residential areas. We also have to be careful about the potential danger of so-called ‘smart cities’ with a centralised brain, that has the possibility of affecting the diversity and autonomy of communities. Everyone working in a neighbourhood must be able to walk to work, and live in the neighbourhood; here ‘everyone’ means everyone, including the domestic helps and janitors for example, otherwise it would be a failed neighbourhood. These clusters should have access to their own funds or means of raising its own operating capital by crowdsourcing, with a ‘people first’ attitude.

Invoking the ‘S’ word here, if we want a sustainable and happy world, we need to foster more interconnected large fraternities that offer random and diverse personal connections, in densely populated autonomous urban clusters. With, of course, a focus on continuous social and technical innovations. We need to start believing in cities. We have to embrace their growth and density, they are not the culprits, rather the key to improving the state of our lives. We have to look into the conundrum of density for Dhaka, and find the virtues in it. 

References:

1. Mineo, Liz. “Over Nearly 80 Years, Harvard Study Has Been Showing How to Live a Healthy and Happy Life.” Harvard Gazette. April 11, 2017. Accessed 2018. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/.
2. Waldinger, Robert. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness.
3. Merz, Thomas. “Creating PDF Files.” Web Publishing with Acrobat/PDF, 1998, 35-56. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-72032-1_4.
4. Allnutt, Thomas F., Simon Ferrier, Glenn Manion, George V. N. Powell, Taylor H. Ricketts, Brian L. Fisher, Grady J. Harper, Michael E. Irwin, Claire Kremen, David C. Lees, Timothy A. Pearce, and Jean‐Noël Labat. “A Method for Quantifying Biodiversity Loss and Its Application to a 50‐year Record of Deforestation across Madagascar.” Freshwater Biology. August 22, 2008. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00027.x.
5. Clarkson, Chris, Zenobia Jacobs, Ben Marwick, Richard Fullagar, Lynley Wallis, Mike Smith, Richard G. Roberts, Elspeth Hayes, Kelsey Lowe, Xavier Carah, S. Anna Florin, Jessica McNeil, Delyth Cox, Lee J. Arnold, Quan Hua, Jillian Huntley, Helen E. A. Brand, Tiina Manne, Andrew Fairbairn, James Shulmeister, Lindsey Lyle, Makiah Salinas, Mara Page, Kate Connell, Gayoung Park, Kasih Norman, Tessa Murphy, and Colin Pardoe. “Human Occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 Years Ago.” Nature News. July 19, 2017. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22968.
6. Khan, Taqsem A. “Http://ljournal.ru/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/a-2017-023.pdf.” Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority: Performance and Challenges, 2017. doi:10.18411/a-2017-023.

This article is from the upcoming issue of VAS. Click here to see the previous issues.

We are already naked, to some of the tech giants. Now before you signup with another new service or install another new app on your phone that asks for a lot of unreasonable access, you must think twice, before you undo your pants to yet another company.

There are two approaches for amateurs for hiding their asses across online ecosystems.

1.You sell yourself to a maximum two tech companies and their ecosystems. Give them everything, drop your pants. And never use these services to login to other websites.

Personally I somewhat trust two companies, Google and Apple. I’m naked to them. And I’ve learned to accept it, for the ease and services they provide. But I am very careful about giving access to certain things to any other service. Those are my contacts book, my live-location, shopping and search habits.

I still hide two things from Google in particular. 1. my search habit, I always use incognito VPN enabled windows for searching, and I often avoid Google for searching altogether. I try to use DuckDuckGo (they suck) or Bing (they suck a little less). When I must use Google, I take precautions. 2. My voice. I recently have completely shut down microphone access to all Google owned services. I don’t trust Google with my voice.

2. Divide and rule: Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. If you are giving away your location to one company, don’t give them your voice. If you are giving away your camera and photos to one, don’t give the same one your location. So that there is always less than enough meta information and data points about you, if one system is compromised. Similarly, when you are communicating individual set of sensitive information, split the communication, i.e: send the username via iMessage and give the password over a phone call or a Signal text, without giving much context to any of the individual communications.

If yes, then what is it based on? What are the parameters?

I read faces. I profile based on facial expression, and appearance. And I am almost always correct. I do not know how do I do it, I do not know what’s the rational a technique. This is somewhat the pure work of intuition.

If it would have been done by an artificial intelligence then could it be a work of intuition only? Or would it have to be based on a set of parameters? Is my intuition also a set of parameters? How intuitive really my intuition is? 🤔

The existence and use of the word ‘culture’ has a fundamental problem. It is inherently selfish and the brewing ground of stereotypes.

The word culture, quickly makes us self-conscious, defensive and proud. We jump into defining the boundaries of it and desperately try to promote its uniqueness.

I want to question the fundamental necessity of it. Why do we at all need to define it, promote it, push it? Isn’t this whole concept equally problematic as nationalism?

I am a Bengali. And I am proud of it. And because of the beauty of Bengali ‘culture’ of openness and pluralism, ironically, I also deny participating in any blatant marketing of it. I carefully judge the limits of celebrating a culture and pushing it to undermine others.

———

23rd April, 2018; 10:15

Then suddenly while reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari:

”Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses, live inside the body of their hosts. They multiply and spread from one host to the other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes even killing them. As long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of its host.

In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They multiply and spread from one host to another, occasionally weakening the hosts and sometimes even killing them.”

Trump is an unfortunate accident, no matter what. But the question is whether it was a planned accident or it just happened and slipped through the cracks of democracy?

The first few chapters of Fire and Fury indicates that the campaign didn’t even want to win the election! They were genuinely surprised by the win and caught off guard, and completely dumb founded about how to handle the preaidency. If that’s the case, then I’d rather believe in what Bannon said about the Russian connection “It’s just a conspiracy theory. The Trump team wasn’t capable of conspiring about anything.”

They were just a herd of monekeys trying to buy fame out of a hastily run political campaign and disrupt the scene. ‘Accidentally’ they won.

Now, this accident is problematic, the existence of a character like Donald Trump doesn’t disturb me, but the fact that people voted for him and he became the POTUS is the scary problem there! This fact scares me that so many people were there to support this buffoon. That’s the single most depressing and scary part of this whole story.

If it was an accident then I would feel a little comfortable. But there are no accidents, as Master Oogway said 🤔

The whole idea of search engine optimization is fundamentally lame. As the moral of the story is, search engines are still stupid and illiterate. They need to grow up, and they need to learn how to aggregate the content that I put up on the web the way I want, not the other way around. If they are not crawling my site and not understanding what I have put up, then it is their problem, their loss 🙄.

If my contents are worthy enough, then people will find it no matter what. And the search engines will eventually learn how to find it. If the don’t, then they will die. And that’s why my only focus is creating worthy contents, and not pampering the search engines. I don’t want to waste my time there.

It is all about discipline, it is about the discipline of putting the right text in right order, and optimising the images for better viewing, fast loading, I am up for doing all those just because that’s the right thing to do. But I am not going to listen to all the stupid advises about key words and modifying a writing based on crawlers’ taste. I write for humans. And humans are prioritised in my work rather than the search engine bots.

You better find me, or number your days. It is as simple as that. And true for anyone and any content and business.