Urban Typography As Artifacts: Activating Collective Memory in Dhaka

Muhammad Nafisur Rahman (University of Cincinnati)

In this paper, visual occupation of political wall art and graphic illustration of letterform in Dhaka—the 400-year-old capital in Bangladesh—will be evaluated through Rossi’s ‘locus solus’—a unique characteristic of a place (Rossi, 1982). It is impossible to disengage Dhaka’s streetscape from the expressive visual cacophony of political wall graphics and slogans, let alone historically analyzed Dhaka University Area, the core of all the political movements. Historic significance of crucial socio-political expression within city walls since the historical language movement in 1952, multilayered signage patterns, reusing of same old facades while constructing new buildings behind them, retaining the façades as street masks—all as hybrid urban artifacts constituting totality to establish a ‘sense of place’ within its traditional urban streetscape. A street is not a production of just a physical definition of environments—but also the nuanced collective memories of the urbanites. Ubiquitous political slogans on public wall, storefront displays, and other modes of storefront signs—all create an active identity and shared experience. Aldo Rossi identifies the city itself as a complex urban artifact and then divides it into its constituent parts—buildings, streets and districts. He employed memories as treasured means; a point of departure for creating architectural artifacts—rich with meaning and potential which enables thinking, reading, and experiencing—the ‘locus’ of the ‘collective memory’. Urban streetscapes are theatrical constructs of urban memory, relationship, and activity. But they are also alive, evolving, negotiated and belong to the “collective memory” involving “agency, activity, and creativity”. Here, wall art is the act of gathering bits and pieces of the past, joining them together as the palpable messy activity which produces collective memory. The paper will argue that the street be understood as a socio-political and experiential place associated with the core of a city’s identity.