Affordability, convenience, welfare and lifestyle issues were packaged on Monday's "Y Factor" programme of the BBC. Although it confines itself to small housing spaces people live in as individuals/ families at the micro level, a host of macro-dynamics may have been drawn into the scene.
Here are some of the interesting snippets to come out of the on-the-spot interviews followed by anthropological and cultural interpretations that the BBC's extraordinary human-interest programme has been based on: In Japanese cities, especially Tokyo, an overwhelming number of people reside in ten square meter space they call their home. It may be good for an individual but with a spouse and a child to the household, what is left of their leg room!
Typically, a folding bed, a closet, a kitchen, a bathing/wash corner are all squeezed in a single room. The closet is obviously inlaid with layers for the folded bed, clothes, linens, blankets and a deep storage. Such practical but creative features mostly out of sight as they leave the ten square meters roomy enough for the two-job couple when they return home after a hard day's work. And the child, well, it would have been left to the secure care of baby-sitting facilities until being returned to the parents. But the Japanese hardly court the luxury of anything even remotely approaching a 'baby boom'.
The society is so work-oriented that home deliveries of food, ready-serve eatables, let alone food joints are easily accessible. Well-maintained public toilet networks are spread at strategic locations to cover the convenience of citizens, especially for the elderly, juveniles and the disabled.
The Second Great War destroyed Tokyo. It was in its rebuilding process from the scratch and the resilient people took to the austere option of making do with small, even one room (with a tiny ante-room in exceptional cases) apartment houses or tenements.
The Japanese indeed prove a point: How little space a human being needs to breathe, live and die in! As a supplementary information, one may add that due to space constraints, a typical Japanese cemetery is a high-rise building where corpses are closeted in rows until it is full up to be replaced by a new high-rise structure.
As a welcome escape from the stressful urban living conditions in major Japanese cities, Tokyo in particular, well-to-do people have been migrating to the suburban areas for living in a quieter and calmer ambience. For work, of course, they are ready to commute to the cities.
One US citizen admitted to living in a ten square meter space with a low ceiling adding to the interviewer that she might have had to crouch a bit to enter the room because she is a bit taller!
In slum areas throughout world, people live like "rabbits-of-a warren."
With such examples before us, we in Bangladesh where the land: man ratio is direly adverse and its capital city is perhaps the densest per km, to the exclusion of city states, shouldn't indulge the luxury of large houses anymore. Thankfully, the real estate business has been constructing apartment buildings for a pretty long time. But there are more apartments now than there are demands for. What's more, the apartment costs are so high that they hardy find any buyers. In spite of the interest-free loans to prospective buyers, the latter are hardly enthusiastic to put their money where the house is.
While the housing sector is spurred on by changing gears to low-cost housing projects enabling them to spread their profits thin and yet net a good sum in the end, let the land reclamation drive be taken forward by a specially empowered body. Taking the grabbed lands under charge and optimally utilising it for public good deserve utmost priority of the government.
We need to harness one of the most basic of our resources: The land. If anything, as part of that process, we will have to put roof over the heads of our people.