On January 25, we convened an International Workshop on Dhaka. It was the third in a series of international workshops within six weeks that we started in December 2024 with our first workshop titled 'South Asian Megacities in Transition'. Each building on the last (while sharpening our intrigue and expanding the scope of inquiry), we funneled our attention to our very own Dhaka now, with a deep compulsion to critically examine its evolving urban fabric to unveil how narratives of identity, memory, and spatial belonging are constantly (re)negotiated at the ‘fault lines’ of state interventions and grassroots mobilizations.

Rooted in the revolutionary spirit of the July movements, the discussions traced how urban enclaves - from the historic corners of Old Dhaka to informal settlements like Korail and Geneva Camp are not merely spaces of habitation but contested arenas where hegemonic state narratives, exclusionary urban policies, and subaltern claims to heritage collide.

From the Peelkhana Massacre to the Gonojagoron Mancha, from the displacements in Vashantek to the everyday negotiations of garment workers, our workshop attempted to interrogate Dhaka as a city where histories of forced migration, colonial urban planning, and neoliberal redevelopment are not merely inscribed onto the built environment but continually contested, reinterpreted, and resisted.

Decolonisation is an ongoing process of rethinking and reconstructing with intellectual courage, cultural empathy, and a dedication to justice in the spatial and educational spheres rather than a single act of rejection. Yesterday's workshop was an exercise in interrogating the complex entanglements of postcolonial pedagogies and practices in architecture across the Global South, while the dialogues were more than just intellectual exchanges rather critical interventions revealing the continuing grip of 'Eurocentric' paradigms and layered negotiations between local/vernaculars, contested heritage narratives, and the evolving dynamics of urban discourses in shaping architectural curricula, professional ideologies, and the broader built environment.