Redesigning of the town hall market complex, Mohammadpur

Abstract

Markets, and especially bazaars, play a very pivotal role in shaping a city's environment and the standard of life its inhabitants enjoy. Markets serving as a catalyst in the development of an urban settlement has hundreds of precedence over the past millennia all over the globe; Markets invariably have been seen to bring people together on the basis of mutual necessities, providing a platform for transactional cooperation. While markets across the cities in South East Asia have transcended the image of a place transaction and evolved into an abstract, physical manifestation of the society it occupies, a few markets in crowded cities like Dhaka, Bangladesh, have started to devolve into dead, unfrequented places. Although not exhaustive, this paper makes an effort into understanding what makes a market tick and identifying the individual factors that can make or break a bazaar. To that very end, a case study of the Town Hall Bazaar Complex in Muhammadpur, Dhaka, has been made and a theoretical design exploration has been done at the end of this paper.