Dhaka
Bangladesh's capital, a dense delta megacity
Dhaka may be the most densely populated big city on Earth, a heaving capital of well over twenty million packed onto the flood-prone flatlands of the Ganges delta. Rickshaws by the hundreds of thousands thread its choked streets, the garment factories that clothe the world hum around the clock, and the rivers that ring the city teem with ferries. It is loud, intense, and growing faster than almost any metropolis on the planet.
The city sits on a low alluvial terrace between the Buriganga, Turag, and other distributaries of the great Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna river system, just a handful of metres above sea level. That position makes Dhaka acutely vulnerable to monsoon flooding, riverbank erosion, and the rising waters of a warming world, even as those same rivers and rich silt have sustained dense human settlement here for centuries. The surrounding delta is among the most fertile and most crowded landscapes anywhere.
Dhaka flourished as a Mughal provincial capital from 1608, when the governor Islam Khan made it the seat of Bengal and named it Jahangirnagar, growing rich on the muslin trade prized across Europe and Asia. Its fortunes faded under British rule as Calcutta rose, but the city revived as capital of East Pakistan and then, after the brutal 1971 Liberation War, as the capital of independent Bangladesh. Today it anchors a ready-made garment industry that has made the country one of the world's largest clothing exporters.