Dhaka’s urban paradox: The city that lost its lungs

As much as audiences fantasise about cyberpunk, Mad Max, and dystopian apocalypses, in terms of aesthetics, do we really want to live like that?

We inhabit a city where breathing has quietly become an act of compromise. Not a conscious one, not something we pause to negotiate each morning, but a compromise nonetheless. We inhale because we must, not because the air invites us to. Somewhere along the way, breathing ceased to be effortless and became conditional—on the season, on the wind direction, on construction dust, on whether the Air Quality Index is merciful that day.

Dhaka today has roughly one tree for every 28 people. Let that sink in for a moment. One tree—a living, breathing organism—expected to support the atmospheric needs of 28 human bodies. Biologically, environmentally, morally, this ratio makes no sense. A single mature tree can produce oxygen for only a fraction of one person's daily requirement. Experts often stress that multiple trees per person are needed to sustainably meet oxygen demand, regulate temperature, and filter pollutants. Yet we have normalised a reality in which scarcity of something as fundamental as clean air barely registers as a daily concern.

At the same time, Bangladesh continues to hover near the top of global air pollution rankings. Dhaka frequently finds itself among the world's most polluted cities, with PM2.5 levels far exceeding what the human body is designed to tolerate. This is not an abstract statistic. This is air that enters our lungs, passes into our bloodstream, and quietly reshapes our health trajectories. And yet, life goes on. We go to work, scroll through our phones, grumble about traffic, and convince ourselves that we have adapted—that we are resilient, that this is simply the cost of living in a "developing" megacity.

But are we really adapting, or merely enduring?

The issue is not just pollution—it is an ecosystem failure. Trees are only one part of Dhaka's unraveling environmental fabric. Water bodies have been filled in and fragmented, disrupting natural drainage and worsening floods. Open spaces have been gloriously replaced by concrete slabs that trap heat and radiate it back into the air. Roads expand faster than green corridors. Buildings rise, but roots disappear. The city has grown outward and upward while shrinking inward. Ultimately, it has lost its capacity to breathe, absorb, cool, and heal itself.

What we are witnessing is not merely environmental degradation; it is a cascading chain of consequences. Poor air quality fuels respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, and chronic fatigue. Rising temperatures intensify stress, aggression, and discomfort. Shrinking green spaces erode mental well-being and social cohesion. When the physical environment becomes hostile, it gradually reshapes behaviour—how we move, how we interact, how patient or irritable we become. This is where the environmental crisis quietly transforms into a sociological one. And somewhere, amid the purchase of faux grass carpets, we have normalised the suffering.

We like to believe that humans are endlessly adaptable—that we can out-innovate nature, out-build our limits, out-run consequences. There is a subtle arrogance in that belief. We convince ourselves that because we have survived worse, we will survive this too. But survival is not the same as living well. The human body did not evolve to filter toxic air every day. Our children did not evolve to grow up without shade, soil, or open sky. Resistance is neither immunity in its plainest form nor in its metaphorical limits.

And yet, our imagination seems more captivated by dystopia than by restoration. We fantasise about cyberpunk cities and post-apocalyptic worlds, aestheticising decay and chaos as if they are distant futures rather than trajectories already unfolding. We empathise with Mad Max while ignoring the fact that environmental collapse rarely arrives with spectacle. It arrives slowly, bureaucratically, disguised as inconvenience, normalised until it becomes irreversible.

Somewhere amid this noise, we have overcomplicated the solution. We chase technological fixes, carbon dashboards, smart sensors, and glossy sustainability narratives, all the while overlooking the most basic truth: a city without trees cannot sustain life. The answer is not a radical reinvention of humanity. It is, in many ways, a return to simplicity.

Planting trees. Restoring water bodies. Creating space for soil, not just steel. Allowing greenery to exist not as decoration, but as infrastructure.

This does not mean romanticising nature or rejecting development. It means redefining development. Real estate should no longer treat greenery as an aesthetic add-on or a marketing visual. Green cover must become a measurable, enforceable component of urban design—one that generates positive externalities for entire communities, not just private balconies. Incentives should reward those who plant, preserve, and maintain green spaces. Subsidies must make urban gardening accessible, not aspirational. Policy should make it easier to grow trees than to cut them down.

But responsibility does not rest with institutions alone. If sustainability is framed solely as regulation, it will always encounter resistance. What we need is a cultural shift—a gamification of nature-based sustainability that allows every stakeholder to participate meaningfully. When planting a tree becomes as socially valued as consumption, when nurturing a garden carries as much prestige as acquiring something new, behaviour begins to change at scale.

We often ask what kind of city we want to live in. Perhaps the better question is: what kind of air do we want to breathe? Clean air is not a luxury. It is not a reward for affluence or good governance. It is a baseline requirement for dignity, health, and continuity.

At its simplest, the solution does not have to begin with grand policies or billion-pound masterplans. It can start at home. A money plant by a window, a snake plant in a corner, a small pot on a balcony—these are not symbolic gestures; they are living interventions. When multiplied across millions of households, they become a collective lung.

Real estate developers, too, have a choice to make. Instead of erasing existing trees to maximise square footage, they can design around them. Instead of exaggerating unit sizes in brochures, they can dedicate part of that space to breathing—planting at least one tree per unit within their boundaries, creating shaded courtyards, allowing roots to exist alongside foundations. Development does not have to mean suffocation. Sometimes, it simply means leaving space for life to grow.

One tree for 28 people is not just an environmental statistic. It is a mirror held up to our priorities. It reveals how easily we trade long-term life for short-term convenience, how quickly we accept imbalance as normal, how reluctant we are to slow down and ask whether this path actually leads somewhere livable.

Are we breathing the way we are meant to? Or are we merely surviving between inhalations, hoping our bodies will forgive us for what our cities have become?

If we truly believe in progress, then the answer cannot lie in more concrete alone. It must lie in roots, in shade, in water, in restraint. Because without restoring the lungs of our city, everything else—growth, innovation, ambition—is built on borrowed air.

And borrowed air always runs out.

Mohaimenul Solaiman Nicholas is a graduate of Economics and Social Sciences from BRAC University. 

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.