On a humid Thursday evening, Ahmed, 22, sits on the steps of a shuttered shopfront near Dhanmondi, scrolling on his phone because there is, in his words, “nowhere else to go that doesn’t cost money.”
A decade ago, he might have walked to a nearby field to play football with friends. That field is now a residential tower. The park two blocks away charges an informal “maintenance fee” that vendors collect from anyone who lingers past dusk. The nearest air-conditioned refuge is a shopping mall food court, where a cup of tea costs more than his daily transport budget.
Ahmed’s predicament is not unique. Across Dhaka, urban planners and youth workers describe a quiet but accelerating crisis: The disappearance of the “third space” – a sociological term for the informal, low-cost or free public venues, distinct from home (first space) and work or school (second space), where people gather, linger, and build community without an economic transaction attached.
In rural Bangladesh, the equivalent has long existed in the form of the “adda” – informal gossip and discussion sessions held on balconies, under banyan trees, or at tea stalls, where conversations flow, free and unforced. That model does not translate easily to a city where land value has outpaced almost every other urban resource.
The village used to have the field, the pond, and the tea stall where nobody asked you to buy something to sit down, but in Dhaka, that has been replaced almost entirely by commercial space. If you want air conditioning, a chair, and a bit of dignity, you go to a mall. But the mall has a price of entry, even if there’s no ticket booth.
Dhaka’s public parks – Ramna, Suhrawardy Udyan, the smaller neighbourhood playgrounds promised in city masterplans – have suffered from encroachment, poor maintenance, and, increasingly, informal privatisation. Residents in Mohammadpur and Mirpur complain about how parks now double as parking lots or are fenced off for “beautification projects” that never reopen to the public.
Safety concerns, particularly for young women, further shrink the pool of parks that feel usable after early evening.
Amid the squeeze, bookshops have become improvised third spaces almost by accident. But there’s only so much loitering the owner or the store manager can tolerate. Young people can spend hours browsing books before the judgmental stares of the manager pierce through.
These pockets of tolerance are fragile and depend entirely on individual proprietors, not policy. Urban planners argue that Dhaka’s development framework has never formally accounted for non-commercial youth space, treating parks and open plots as land banks for future construction rather than as social infrastructure.
While City Corporation officials have often pointed to ongoing “green space” initiatives, in truth, very few, if any, dedicated youth-space policies exist. Without one, the market will likely continue to fill the vacuum – at a price young people cannot always afford.
These young people are not asking for luxury, just somewhere to sit.
