Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

The craft districts are products of many generations, created and carried through shared experiences of practicing communities. It is a symbolization of their values, ensuring continuity of their traditional way of life and socio-cultural practices rooted in this place from the remote past. The two selected districts are indigenous and informal developments in the history of the Dhaka region. Being an organic city’s part with anthropological cognition, here lays two exceptionally “beautiful” linear orders over the old city fabric with long established cultural traditions and historical layering of socialization based upon craft. It’s better to introduce human activity at the center and the inhabitants’ sense of place, territorial definition in their “parallel city” mind would be prioritized by signs. Foremost discussion concentrates and investigates the dynamics of two distinct craft based districts’ cultural collective growth. The spatial structure of vernacular settlement coincides with the functional and cultural performances and corresponds to the underlying force behind the city’s spontaneous organic formation. As distinctive communities, the sites indicate together more humane involvement within their art-religion interplay over a lost landscape context. Physicality could be mislaid but also identity cannot be created overnight. Collective identity becomes eternal through practices but only traceable through semiotic signs in a society.