Population density in Bangladesh

One question I've always had is how do so many people manage to live in Bangladesh, China and India? Bangladesh is especially baffling. How do 162 million people - according to Wikipedia in 2009 - manage to live in a country of just 147,750 sq. km, the size of the state of New York or slightly larger than Greece? The mean density is 1100 people per sq. km. Although Dhaka is big and has 12 million people in its metro area, most people in Bangladesh live in rural areas, so not everybody lives crowded in huge cities. So how do they manage to fit all these people in so very little land? I decided to go to Google Earth to find out.



Dhaka- in fact it's a very compact city - nor much urban sprawl destroying farmland Only 30 km x 10 km with 12 million people!


In a time when we are confronted by resource scarcity there must be something good the Bangladeshi people are doing to manage their resources to provide food, shelter and water to its people. With only 40 million people in Colombia and so many conflicts for land, Bangladesh should really be able to teach us something.

I was surprised at how pretty the countryside in Bangladesh looks from space. I see a lot of small farming plots with houses clustered along roads and lined up with trees, plus square ponds everywhere, presumably for water storage from rain and wells. It all seems very efficiently used and reasonably equitable, with no land wasted in suburban expansion, parking lots and industrial uses. The Ganges-Brahmaputra delta looks indeed extremely fertile.

It's pleasantly surprising that the areas with more trees are in fact many times where villages are, so much that you can barely see the houses.

This is in an island in the Bay of Bengal.

This pattern is apparent across Bangladesh, lots of houses clustered in hamlets with plots surrounding them. It looks like a remarkably organized and equitable peasant society from the air, where all the plots are similar and there is little sight of large plantations or big haciendas that monopolize the land.


This other snapshot looks like two different kinds of crops, perhaps rice and jute, the two main crops of the country

These are closer looks of typical villages. All across Bangladesh it is evident that people use every available space to grow crops and try to use as little as possible for urbanization. This area looks as neat and organized as the English countryside One would think that with so many people there is no forest left at all in Bangladesh. But to the east of the country there is, in the mountains. Again, the low lying areas seem well used for agriculture and settlements. Bangladesh is known for its vulnerability to climate change. The image of this area shows flooded fields, maybe after a monsoon storm. Looks like all the houses are in the uplands. Bangladesh shares the magnificent Sundarbans mangroves with India. The mangrove forest looks well protected, as the border with the protected area is noticeably sharp from space.

This is a larger scale picture of coastal Bangladesh, all the islands crisscrossed by roads lined by houses with cropland in the back. They have been able to support so many people up to now, but who knows if they will be able to do so in the future if sea levels rise.

Bangladesh might not only be a victim of climate change. It can also have good answers for the rest of the world to be able to share resources in an Earth that is getting more and more crowded.

Of course, many things are hard to tell from satellite imagery, like pollution and wildlife hunting. But Bangladesh did surprise me positively from space. If you want to check it out yourself, download the Google Earth placemarks file of this virtual trip here.