14 Urbanization, land and regions

Chapter 14 of 60 in the Bangladesh 2036 research base. Contents of the series.

The country is one third urban on paper and two thirds urban in trajectory, and the decade is decided by land institutions rather than by construction

Bangladesh enters the FY27 to FY36 window that the chapter 15 scenarios assume with 33.24 percent of its people counted as urban in 2025 [WB WDI 2026] and 66.76 percent counted as rural [WB WDI 2026], yet the same record shows the rural population still rising in absolute terms [WB WDI 2026]. The apparent slowness of the urban transition is a measurement and institution story, not a development one: the census counted 31.51 percent of the enumerated population in urban areas in 2022, 31.66 percent after the post enumeration check adjustment [BBS Census 2022, district locality tables and PEC adjusted tables], and urban growth reaccelerated to 2.82 percent in 2024 and 2.92 percent in 2025, the fastest reading since 2006 [WB WDI 2026]. Whether the 12 to 22 million additional urban residents this chapter's arithmetic projects for 2036 land in one megacity or in a system of cities is decided by the institutions that record, price and zone land, and by whether municipal government exists to service plots already sold, not by construction capacity. The same institutions govern the farm side: a net cropped area of 19,875 thousand acres in FY22 [BBS Agri 2024] under a population the UN projects at 196.74 million in 2036 [UN WPP 2024, medium variant] makes farmland conversion a food security question shared with chapter 11.

The record: a slow counted share shift on a fast absolute rise, with urban government trailing the growth

The urban population grew from 42.20 million persons in 2010 to 58.40 million in 2025, while the urban share rose 5.51 points, from 27.73 to 33.24 percent [WB WDI 2026]. The pace collapsed and recovered: urban growth eased from 2.38 percent in 2010 to 1.72 percent in 2021, then rose to 2.74 percent in 2023, 2.82 percent in 2024 and 2.92 percent in 2025 [WB WDI 2026]. The census puts it in administrative terms: 165.16 million persons enumerated in 2022, 169.83 million after the post enumeration check adjustment, of whom 52.05 million lived in urban areas, 31.51 percent, alongside 1.74 million persons in slum areas and 22,185 floating persons with no dwelling at all [BBS Census 2022, district locality and slum tables]. Rural is where the people still are, 117.29 million persons in 2025 against 110.91 million in 2012 [WB WDI 2026], but not where they are going: 25 of 64 districts recorded negative rural population growth across 2011 to 2022, including Rangpur district at minus 1.17 percent a year rural against 7.52 percent a year urban [BBS Census 2022, district growth tables].

Dhaka primacy is the defining shape of the system and still deepening. The agglomeration the World Bank series tracks as the largest city grew from 14.73 million persons in 2010 to 24.65 million in 2025, and its share of the national urban population rose every single year, from 34.91 to 42.22 percent [WB WDI 2026]. Cities above one million together held 30.31 million persons in 2025, 17.25 percent of the national population against 12.38 percent in 2010 [WB WDI 2026]. The census tables show the agglomeration's footprint is a ring, not a city: Dhaka district holds 14.73 million persons at 10,067 persons per square kilometre, 76.3 percent urban, while its industrial satellites are the fastest growing places in the country, Gazipur district at 5.26 million persons and 10.51 percent a year of urban growth, Narayanganj district at 3.91 million persons and 5,712 persons per square kilometre [BBS Census 2022, district tables and growth tables]. Dhaka division as a whole holds 44.22 million persons, 26.77 percent of the national population, and is 46.95 percent urban, against the national 31.51 percent [BBS Census 2022, district tables].

Four fifths of households, 80.79 percent, own their dwelling unit and 17.29 percent rent, on weighted sums of the census district tables [BBS Census 2022, district tenancy tables]. The stock is still rural in quality: 22.46 percent of households live in pucca structures and 18.18 percent in semi pucca, while 58.78 percent live in kancha houses and 0.59 percent in jhupri shacks [BBS Census 2022, district housing structure tables]. Slum concentration follows the jobs: 5.13 percent of Dhaka district households and 3.80 percent of Chattogram district households live in slum dwellings, against a national share of 1.20 percent [BBS Census 2022, district slum tables]. Two measures of urban deprivation disagree, and the gap is the finding: the census counts 1.74 million persons in declared slum areas, while the UN-Habitat definition in the World Bank series, counting households lacking durability, water, sanitation or space, puts 51.51 percent of the urban population in slum conditions in 2022, from 55.09 percent in 2010 [WB WDI 2026]. The welfare trend is two sided: urban poverty fell from 21.3 percent in 2010 to 14.7 percent in 2022 on the upper line, while urban income inequality rose from a Gini of 0.452 to 0.539, and the national Gini moved from 0.458 to 0.499 almost entirely on the urban move [BBS HIES 2022, poverty and Gini tables].

The land base under the rural two thirds is static, and food security now runs on yield. Agricultural land covers 72.31 percent of the land area in the 2023 reading and arable land is 0.046 hectares per person [WB WDI 2026]. The BBS land utilization record shows the cropland base inching down: net cropped area fell from 19,973 thousand acres in FY19 to 19,875 thousand acres in FY22, while gross cropped area held near 39,358 thousand acres on a cropping intensity of 198 percent, and irrigated area reached 19,750 thousand acres [BBS Agri 2024]. Output rose on yield, not area: rice production rose from 36,390 thousand metric tonne in FY19 to 42,060 thousand metric tonne in FY24, maize from 3,569 to 5,000 thousand metric tonne, while national cereal production reached 66.35 million metric tonne in 2024 on 12.27 million hectares of cereal land, essentially the same area as 2012, with the yield at 5,408 kilogram per hectare [BBS Agri 2024] [WB WDI 2026]. The sector this land supports is now a small share of value and the largest share of work: agriculture was 11.30 percent of GDP in FY23 [BBS NA 2024] and held 44.7 percent of employment in 2024, the reversal chapter 08 documents [ILO 2025]. Rural transformation is real but partial: households keep one foot in the farm and one in remittances and non farm work, with 3.95 million households, 9.81 percent of the total, receiving foreign remittances at the census [BBS Census 2022, district remittance tables, household weighted sums].

The regional map is one of converging poverty and diverging opportunity: divisional upper poverty rates in 2022 ranged from 14.8 percent in Khulna to 26.9 percent in Barishal, with Mymensingh at 24.2 and Rangpur at 24.8, and the biggest movement was Rangpur's fall from 47.2 percent in 2016 [BBS HIES 2022, divisional poverty tables]. The remittance economy is a corridor economy: 22.67 percent of households in Chattogram division and 17.15 percent in Sylhet division receive foreign remittances, against 1.15 percent in Rangpur division, through specific districts, Feni at 33.85 percent, Brahmanbaria at 33.50 percent and Cumilla at 31.71 percent of households [BBS Census 2022, district remittance tables, household weighted sums]. Chattogram is the second city and the port, the trade chapters' physical constraint: 3.17 million TEU and 123.24 million metric tonne of cargo in FY24, vessel turnaround of 2.58 days, berth occupancy that peaked at 92 percent in FY22 [CPA 2024]. The rest of the city system is thin institutionally: the Khulna Development Authority approved 735 building plans in FY21, 1,391 in FY22 and 1,548 in FY23, and made 32, 15 and 0 residential plot allotments, while recording an operating deficit of 7.06 crore BDT in FY23 [KDA 2023, operational and financial panels]. The development budget's weight sits behind local government: the Local Government Division holds 32,998.76 crore BDT across 223 projects, 14.35 percent of the 230,000.00 crore BDT FY26 development programme and its largest single ministry line, most of it rural infrastructure rather than urban government [Planning Commission ADP 2025, ministry wise allocation table].

The Department of Land Records and Survey reports 12,734,123 khatians, the record of rights, and 65,140 mouza maps supplied to the contractor for online upload between 2017 and March 2022, and in FY23 alone 537,000 khatian entries and 639,000 khatian printings at the settlement press [DLRS 2023, annual report 2022-23]. The Bangladesh Digital Survey, a re-survey of a cadastral base first drawn in the colonial era, formally began in Chattogram on 6 August 2023, with a digital land zoning project building mouza and plot level land use databases alongside it [DLRS 2023, annual report 2022-23]. What the machinery does not yet deliver is a price or a credit market: no series in the data lake measures Dhaka land prices, apartment rents, a national land price or rent index, or a mortgage stock, every figure quoted for them could not be confirmed, and Bangladesh Bank, RAJUK and the land ministry's agencies are the resolving sources.

Mechanism: boundary lag, a Dhaka concentration loop, migration as the regional equaliser and a collateral machine that cannot prove title

The first mechanism is accretion instead of city formation: urban boundaries are administrative, drawn around city corporations and pourashava municipalities, so density that accumulates outside those lines stays statistically rural while behaving economically urban. Gazipur and Narayanganj are, in function, districts of the Dhaka metropolitan economy with a combined census population of 9.17 million persons, yet only the parts inside municipal lines count as urban [BBS Census 2022, district tables]. The ready made garment sector drove the pattern, dispersing factories along the Dhaka to Chattogram and Dhaka to Mymensingh corridors, documented in chapters 02 and 08. The 2021 to 2024 reacceleration of measured urban growth [WB WDI 2026] is boundary and migration effects coinciding: the flood and erosion displacement chapter 11 records pushed households into towns while census reclassification caught up with the periphery. Planning instruments attach to the administrative city while the actual city is a corridor: zoning, building control and property taxation stop where the pourashava ends, exactly where the growth is.

The second mechanism is the Dhaka engine, a concentration loop between jobs, land control and infrastructure. The city's job base, garments, trader services and government, pays wages far above the rural reservation wage, and migration follows, chapter 08's arithmetic. Land supply inside the planned area is restricted by RAJUK's Detailed Area Plan, which targets a 2035 horizon and whose flood flow and agricultural zones restrict conversion; its 2022 approval could not be confirmed from the sources this chapter draws on, where the RAJUK plan document held is the earlier map approved by SRO 232-Law/2010 on 22 June 2010 carrying the same zone categories [RAJUK 2023, Detailed Area Plan documents]. Restricted supply against rising demand capitalises into land prices rather than housing volume, and what gets built is the expensive vertical kind for the top of the distribution. The state then builds the new city itself, because the market cannot assemble land: the Purbachal New Town project, RAJUK's 30 sector flagship east of the capital, laid out 26,213 residential plots and handed over about 24,251 of them, with 7,864 plots allocated to original residents and 144 acres kept as forest [RAJUK 2023, Purbachal progress report]. Against 24,251 plots handed over stand roughly 300 approved building plans, 1,495 electricity connections and 315 of 365 kilometres of road: the state prints plots, but occupation needs infrastructure, finance and confidence that arrive years later. Congestion, heat and air then price the poor into the informal settlements the deprivation measure counts, the slow hazards chapter 11 documents, and the city reproduces inequality, the 0.539 urban Gini [BBS HIES 2022, Gini tables], faster than the poverty line absorbs it.

The third mechanism explains why poverty converged while opportunity did not. Roads, electrification and the agricultural intensification documented above are spatially generic, which is why Rangpur could halve its poverty rate from 47.2 percent while remaining the division with the lowest remittance penetration at 1.15 percent of households [BBS HIES 2022, divisional poverty tables] [BBS Census 2022, remittance tables]. The high return activities, garment work, remittance funded construction, port trade and government, concentrate in the Dhaka and Chattogram corridors, so the equalising instrument for the lagging regions is outmigration, which the negative rural growth of 25 districts registers [BBS Census 2022, district growth tables]. Migration is how a country with a 12.1 point divisional poverty spread avoids a 12.1 point welfare spread, and why urban policy is regional policy: every constraint on absorbing migrants in Dhaka keeps the Rangpur household poor where it stands.

The fourth mechanism is land administration as the economy's missing collateral machine. Chapter 07 documents small enterprise credit at 5.98 percent of GDP and lending that is collateral first, and the collateral that matters is land [IMF FAS 2024]. The World Bank's Business Ready 2025 assessment scores Bangladesh's dispute resolution and commercial justice system 45.81 out of 100 [WB BREADY 2025], and the land record is where that score bites: mutation records that lag transfers by years, khatians that do not match the map, and a civil docket whose land dispute share no series in the data lake measures, and which therefore could not be confirmed, with the Supreme Court and Law and Justice Division resolving. The settlement record carries the burden: in the Dinajpur zone alone, 1,109,366 objection cases stood against 3,006 mouzas, of which 1,091,826 were disposed by FY23 with 100,000 disposed in the year [DLRS 2023, annual report 2022-23, Dinajpur zone]. Every layer raises the cost of proving ownership until banks prefer urban property with clear titles or no collateral at all. Bank advances to construction stood at 116,815 crore BDT of 1,446,073 crore BDT total advances at end December 2023, 8.1 percent [BB Econ 2024], a flow that finances developers with records rather than households with plots.

The decade ahead: up to 22 million more urban residents ride on four decisions, each with a named author

The arithmetic that frames the window. The UN medium variant projects a national population of 177.82 million persons in 2026 and 196.74 million in 2036, with density rising from 1,366 to 1,511 persons per square kilometre and annual growth falling to 0.80 percent [UN WPP 2024, medium variant]. This chapter's arithmetic starts from the 2025 urban stock of 58.40 million persons [WB WDI 2026]: if measured urban growth holds at its 2025 pace of 2.92 percent, the stock reaches roughly 80 million persons by 2036, 41 percent of the projected population, 22 million added in eleven years; if the rate decays in a straight line to the projected 0.80 percent national rate, it reaches roughly 71 million, 36 percent, 12 million added. At the 2019 to 2025 pace of 3.3 percent a year the Dhaka agglomeration alone reaches about 35 million persons by 2036, and that is the baseline scenario's Dhaka, not a forecast: concentration or dispersal is the policy variable. The chapter 15 scenarios inherit this arithmetic, the baseline assumes continued primacy with the Dhaka share of urban population near 45 percent, the reform scenario assumes secondary city absorption holds the Dhaka share nearer 40 percent, and the stall scenario assumes climate displacement accelerates the megacity path. The displacement stock is already on the table: IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix counted 4,955,527 internally displaced persons nationwide on 31 October 2025, 795,798 of them in Dhaka division [IOM DTM 2025]. The World Bank's internal climate migration projections would quantify the climate share of that stock and could not be confirmed from the sources this chapter draws on, the published report the resolving source [WB CCDR 2022].

The cadastral decision, authored by the Ministry of Land with the Department of Land Records and Survey, is whether the Bangladesh Digital Survey leaves Chattogram and becomes the national re-survey inside the decade the project documents target [DLRS 2023, annual report 2022-23]. Completion converts the e-Porcha record from a scanned archive into a living title system, the precondition for mortgage finance against the four fifths of households who own their dwellings, for the property tax base municipal government lacks, and for the compensation regime chapter 10's land acquisition requires. The Dhaka governance decision, authored by RAJUK with the two Dhaka city corporations, is whether the plan that targets 2035 is enforced against flood zone conversion while Purbachal's 26,213 printed plots [RAJUK 2023, Purbachal progress report] are serviced fast enough to absorb demand at the periphery rather than in the flood plain. The secondary city decision, authored by the Local Government Division with the development authorities, is whether municipalities get a fiscal base and borrowing framework, because the KDA record of zero plot allotments in FY23 [KDA 2023, operational panel] against Gazipur's 10.51 percent annual urban growth [BBS Census 2022, district growth tables] measures the gap between where people are going and where the state builds. The farmland decision, authored by the Ministry of Agriculture with the land ministry's zoning project, is whether the digital land zoning databases being built mouza by mouza [DLRS 2023, annual report 2022-23] become binding on conversion before the cropland base breaks: this chapter's arithmetic assumes cereal demand rises from 66.35 million metric tonne in 2024 toward roughly 75 million metric tonne by 2036 to hold per head availability flat [WB WDI 2026] [UN WPP 2024, medium variant], and on a flat cereal area every tonne must come from yield.

Three risks print in monthly series and the upside is three dividends the same datasets price

Risks. First, Dhaka lock in: the agglomeration reaches about 35 million persons by 2036 on the baseline scenario's path, primacy crosses 45 percent of the urban population, and congestion, flood exposure and chapter 11's slow hazards convert agglomeration economies into costs; the revealing indicator is the largest city share series [WB WDI 2026]. Second, farmland conversion with a yield plateau: net cropped area breaks below 19,500 thousand acres while cereal yield growth falls below 1 percent a year, forcing grain imports onto the external bill chapter 03 finances; the revealing indicators are the land utilization panel [BBS Agri 2024] and the cereal yield series [WB WDI 2026]. Third, the title conflict trap: digitisation proceeds but mutation and litigation do not clear, so land stays expensive to prove and cheap to dispute, bank credit avoids household land collateral, and the SME credit famine chapter 07 documents deepens; the revealing indicator is the cadastral completion count against the mutation service times the land ministry publishes [DLRS 2023, annual report 2022-23].

Upside. First, the collateral dividend: a completed digital cadastre makes the family plot bankable, and credit that chapter 07 cannot place prices itself against 12.7 million digitised khatians, not relationships [DLRS 2023, annual report 2022-23] [IMF FAS 2024]. Second, the corridor dispersal dividend: the Gazipur and Narayanganj record shows industrial urbanisation can run ahead of the state rather than behind it, the same mechanism along the Dhaka to Chattogram corridor and around the Bay ports chapter 10 builds delivers the secondary city absorption the decade needs; the revealing indicator is the urban growth of the non Dhaka divisions in the next census round against the 4.4 percent a year the districts outside Dhaka division averaged in 2011 to 2022, the simple mean of district rates [BBS Census 2022, district growth tables]. Third, the density dividend: a population heading for 1,511 persons per square kilometre [UN WPP 2024, medium variant] is the ridership base that makes metro, bus and rail economics work, and the mass transit chapter 10 documents is affordable per rider because Dhaka is dense, the one sense in which the megacity path lowers the reform scenario's cost.

What to watch: five indicators whose thresholds mark the regime

1. Urban population growth rate. Current value 2.92 percent in 2025, the fastest since 2006 [WB WDI 2026]. Threshold: a rate sustained above 2.5 percent through the decade confirms the baseline's accretion regime; a fall below 2 percent alongside rising non Dhaka urban shares signals managed dispersal.
2. Dhaka share of the urban population. Current value 42.22 percent in 2025, up every year since 2010 [WB WDI 2026]. Threshold: a reading above 45 percent is the lock in regime; a fall below 40 percent means the reform scenario's secondary city absorption is happening.
3. Slum share of the urban population. Current value 51.51 percent in 2022 on the UN-Habitat deprivation definition [WB WDI 2026]. Threshold: a reading below 45 percent in the next measurement round is the housing delivery turn; a reading above 55 percent confirms the exclusion regime.
4. Net cropped area. Current value 19,875 thousand acres in FY22, from 19,973 thousand acres in FY19 [BBS Agri 2024]. Threshold: a fall below 19,500 thousand acres means conversion is outrunning the zoning machinery and the cereal arithmetic shifts onto imports; stabilisation near 19,800 is the farmland regime holding.
5. Divisional poverty spread. Current value 12.1 points in 2022, Barishal at 26.9 percent minus Khulna at 14.8 percent on the upper line [BBS HIES 2022, divisional poverty tables]. Threshold: a spread above 15 points, or a Rangpur print back above 30 percent, marks regional divergence returning; a spread below 8 points confirms the convergence regime.

Sources used

[WB WDI 2026] World Bank World Development Indicators via bdpolicy parquet indicators/wb_full_bd and the hdx/wb_combined pull for the 2025 rows, series: SP.URB.TOTL, SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS, SP.URB.GROW, SP.RUR.TOTL, SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS, EN.URB.LCTY, EN.URB.LCTY.UR.ZS, EN.URB.MCTY, EN.URB.MCTY.TL.ZS, EN.POP.SLUM.UR.ZS, AG.LND.AGRI.ZS, AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC, AG.PRD.CREL.MT, AG.LND.CREL.HA, AG.YLD.CREL.KG.

[BBS Census 2022] Population and Housing Census 2022 district tables via bdpolicy parquet lake/demographics and the PEC adjusted population table via ocr_text/census2022_thematic: locality and urban rural population, slum and floating population, district growth, tenancy, housing structure, remittance households; weighted division and national sums computed in this chapter.

[BBS HIES 2022] Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2022 via bdpolicy.db series bbs_hies_* and parquet lake/poverty/bbs_hies_divisional_poverty: poverty headcounts, income Gini coefficients, divisional poverty tables 2016 and 2022.

[BBS Agri 2024] Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics agriculture statistics via bdpolicy parquet lake/agriculture: land utilization and crops panels.

[BBS NA 2024] BBS national accounts via bdpolicy.db, series: bbs_gdp_share_agriculture_pct, from chapter 01.

[ILO 2025] ILOSTAT modelled estimates via bdpolicy parquet, series: ilo_emp_temp_sex_eco_nb_a, from chapter 08.

[UN WPP 2024] UN World Population Prospects 2024 medium variant via bdpolicy parquet, population and density projections to 2036.

[CPA 2024] Chattogram Port Authority maritime traffic panel through FY2023-24, from chapter 10.

[BB Econ 2024] Bangladesh Bank scheduled bank advances by economic purpose via bdpolicy.db, series: bb_bank_advances_construction, bb_bank_advances_total, end December 2023, million BDT converted to crore, from chapter 06.

[DLRS 2023] Department of Land Records and Survey, Ministry of Land, Annual Report 2022-23, khatian and mouza map digitisation, settlement press output, Bangladesh Digital Survey and digital land zoning, and the Dinajpur zone objection case stock, OCR text.

[RAJUK 2023] Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha, Purbachal New Town progress report and the Detailed Area Plan map approved by SRO 232-Law/2010, OCR text.

[KDA 2023] Khulna Development Authority building plan approvals, plot allotments and FY2022-23 financial performance, via bdpolicy parquet lake/urban_development.

[Planning Commission ADP 2025] Annual Development Programme 2025-2026, Programming Division, Bangladesh Planning Commission, June 2025, ministry wise allocation table, Local Government Division line, share taken on the 230,000.00 crore approved programme, https://adp.plancomm.gov.bd/book/2025-2026-ADP-BOOK.pdf, accessed 6 September 2026, from chapter 04.

[IMF FAS 2024] IMF Financial Access Survey via bdpolicy.db, series: imf_fas_sme_loans_pct_gdp, from chapter 07.

[IOM DTM 2025] International Organization for Migration, Displacement Tracking Matrix, internally displaced persons total and by division as of 31 October 2025, via HDX HAPI in bdpolicy.db, series: hapi_idps_*.

[WB BREADY 2025] World Bank Business Ready 2025 assessment, dispute resolution and commercial justice pillar score, via bdpolicy.db, series: wb_bready2025_dispute_resolution_overall.

[WB CCDR 2022] World Bank Bangladesh Country Climate and Development Report, resolving source for internal climate migration projections, figures not held in the data lake used by this chapter, from chapter 11.

---

Verified line by line against primary sources: 112 claims checked, 2 corrected.

Previous: 13 Digital economy and AI

Next: 15 Scenarios 2036

All sixty chapters and the ten narrative chapters.