Well, let us consider an image inventory of Dhaka's whirlwind modernity: massive shopping arcades incessantly cannibalising streams of shoppers; frenzied people everywhere navigating treacherous streets; the unexpected respite of the Parliament building; persistent hawkers offering dirt-cheap, pirated copies of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and micro-credited beggars selling bananas at traffic lights; the cacophony of all kinds of vehicles; the sudden and serpentine ascent of Mohakhali fly-over; restaurants with fluttering canvases advertising tk. 295 buffets; mannequins at trendy boutique stores gawking back at the chaos of everyday life from their lonely perches; and massive billboards rising right above squalid squatter colonies to advertise mobile phones.

A long list indeed. Yet that is precisely the point. Dhaka has become a jigsaw puzzle of myriad spectacles, an urban maze perhaps destined to remain unsolved. There is almost a Dante-esque infernal quality about Dhaka's modernity, one that perpetually sucks everything into a dizzying vortex of land speculation, economic extremities, environmental degradation, and fledgling entrepreneurship. Neither despair nor hope alone can account for the city's exhilarating urbanity. If the city's crumbling infrastructure and traffic congestion epitomise the murky time ahead, then the fantastic, populist architecture of mushrooming gas pumps along the main arteries of the expanding metropolis suggests a future of prosperity.

In other words, there is no single vantage point to grasp the city and its array of characters. Dhaka seems like the ultimate modernist narrative in which optimism and pessimism could not find a more fluid coexistence. Modernity is "a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity…it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal…To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all that is solid melts into air.'" Thus, to see modernity as a monolithic linear progress is to misunderstand the complexity of development.

Here is a megalopolis of nearly twelve million people that would have been a perfect backdrop for Salvador Dali's surrealist fantasies or the nineteenth-century French lyrical poet Charles Baudelaire's literary anatomy of transient modern life. "Howl," the American poet Allen Ginsberg's existential angst over the hyper-modernity of 1950s New York, could pretty well be an apt description of current Dhaka: "What sphinx of cement and aluminum hacked open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?...Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasures! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses!" Ginsberg's modern city is hardly a wasteland, but rather a battle field where the social, cultural, and economic forces of modernity engage in an epic struggle. Take a walk around Farmgate or Motijheel and hear the reverberations of Ginzberg's howl!

Both middle-class Dhakaites and peripatetic Western reporters often dismiss Dhaka as an uninhabitable urban jungle. In a 2003 Newsweek special issue, a journalist named Ron Moreau called the capital city "a potential catastrophe" or "a disaster waiting to happen." Moreau's impatient eye focuses exclusively on the capital city's disorderly development to relegate it to "the ledger of Asian urban basket cases." What Moreau forgets in his blanket criticism is the inherently chaotic nature of modernisation. A bit of historical awareness would suffice to make the point. Charles Dickens's London, Baudelaire's Paris, James Joyce's Dublin, and Ginsberg's New York -- all meticulously trace modernity's alter ego: chaos or contradiction. These cities are of course literary representations, but they are based on objective observations of reality, one in which both disruptive and liberating effects of modernity were experienced in their fullest intensity. As the histories of these great cities reveal, being modern means straddling contradictory currents.

If the Newsweek report evinces the most negative visage of Dhaka, a 2005 New York Times feature, "In Bangladesh, an epic sign of changing fortunes," presents the most positive end of the spectrum. Identifying, if cautiously, the colossal $80-million Bashundhara City shopping complex as an index of Bangladesh's recent economic progress, the Times piece introduces a different kind of Bangladesh, one that is not hobbled by natural calamities or derogatory "bottomless basket" syndromes. Yet, ironically, the Bashundhara City's impressive 180-feet wide glass dome over the eight-story atrium also suggests the widening gap between the nouveau riche and the poor: only about 6 percent of the city's population can afford to shop in the sprouting markets of the capital. Here is an example of the contradictory nature of modernity, the juggernaut that won't wait around for the other 94 percent to catch up!

Dhaka is full of contradiction, and chaos is its surname. But the bottom line is that chaos and contradiction are not necessarily negative forces. Romantic as it may sound, ambiguities could well be the ingredients of a vibrant urbanity as well as economic nourishment. Excessive order can blunt human imagination and silence necessary dissent, whereas chaos, social or physical, can spawn unexpected bursts of creativity and entrepreneurship. Chaos, however, should not be confused with corruption or lawlessness.

The Algerian psychiatrist and renowned postcolonial author, Franz Fanon, stressed the need for a non-structured life to mobilise society toward a path of revolution. The uniform grid of bureaucracy in the city and the anonymity of human relations it necessitates, Fanon argues, fuel city dwellers' compulsive desire for self-exclusion into private circles where they would not be overwhelmed by uncertainty. Uniformity -- a peculiar middle-class dream -- ensures psychological comfort, but ultimately limits creative pursuits. In short, with all its urban pathologies and political anarchy, something good can come out of Dhaka's labyrinth. The civil society can play a seminal role in this process by relentlessly articulating a vision of necessary chaos and diversity in urban life.

Dr. Adnan Morshed is Assistant Professor School of Architecture and Planning The Catholic University of America Washington, DC.