ABSTRACT
Branches of canals, still the biotope of water plants and lotus owers, making their way through construction sites where greyish concrete slabs wait to be mounted on high-rise buildings; privately developed residential blocks awaiting the ocial provision of electricity and water and then the arrival of middle-class families, while the ever-growing settlements of the poor conduct a life of their own. The signs of accelerated urbanization are easy to detect in Dhaka, corrugated-iron capital city of Bangladesh. Its streets attest to the highly diverse lifestyles of millions of inhabitants, many of them immigrants from all over the country, each pursuing individual, and not always reciprocally compatible, dreams, visions and expectations.
