Drive north past Uttara's older sectors and the city changes character. The roads widen. The plots grow larger. Fences appear around empty land where a house is planned but not yet built. This is the third phase of Uttara Model Town, and it has been taking shape for longer than most of its plot owners expected.
The project was taken up by RAJUK in 1999, on about 2,008 acres of land in the Diabari, Bauniya, Deul, Bailjuri, Chandalbhog and Nalbhog areas, and approved by the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council in May 2000. It added three new sectors, 15, 16 and 17, for residential plots, and Sector 18 for flats. In total RAJUK allotted 8,295 residential plots, along with commercial and institutional plots. The plan was to finish by 2010. That date passed, and the project has been extended several times since.
Plots, fences and slow roads
By late 2020, more than 5,000 of the plots had been handed over, while the rest waited on roads, bridges and utility lines. Plot owners in Sector 17 waited longest, with land filling and road work running years behind the other sectors. A plot owner quoted in The Business Standard that year said RAJUK had given him only papers.
That tension, between paper allotment and ground reality, is the story of the third phase. A plot is handed over when its demarcation pillars are in place and a road reaches it. Until then it is a line on a map. Visitors to Sectors 15 and 16 today see a different picture from five years ago: houses standing, families moved in, shops opening along the main roads. Sector 17 is catching up more slowly. The work is not finished, but the direction is visible in a way it was not a decade ago.
Sector 18 and the flats
Sector 18 is the third phase's other half, and it works differently. Instead of plots, RAJUK is building flats there. The Uttara Apartment Project covers 214.44 acres, with around 18,000 flats planned in categories of different sizes. Applications for the first category, flats of 1,250 square feet net, were invited years ago, with smaller categories to follow in phases. For middle-income buyers who cannot afford a plot and a house, a RAJUK flat in Sector 18 is the route into Uttara, and the waiting list has stayed long.
The flat project also explains why the metro matters so much here. The MRT-6 depot sits at Diabari, at the end of the third phase area, and Uttara North station is the line's northern terminus. A resident of Sector 18 can reach Motijheel by metro without touching the traffic of the airport road. That connection is already running, and it is the single piece of infrastructure in the third phase that is complete and in daily use.
The lake beside the sectors
Between the older sectors and the third phase runs Uttara Lake, and its story is slower than the housing. The Uttara Lake Development Project was approved in 2014, with a two-year timeline and a cost estimate of Tk 37.32 crore. The aim was to protect the lake from encroachment, improve water retention, stop pollution and build walkways and recreation space along its banks.
More than a decade later the project has been extended six times, and the deadline now stands at June 2026. The revised cost is Tk 90.73 crore, nearly two and a half times the original estimate, with RAJUK bearing Tk 78.85 crore of it. By May 2025, financial progress had reached 62.65 percent and physical progress 65 percent.
Residents who walk beside it can see the difference the work has made and the distance still to go. Some stretches have embankments and trees. Others still carry the signs of encroachment and unfinished piling. The lake is the third phase's shared asset, and its condition will shape how the new sectors feel to live in.
Who is moving there
The people moving into the third phase are a mix. Some are plot allottees who waited years and are finally building. Some are buyers of resale plots in Sectors 15 and 16, where the roads and services are furthest along. Some are flat applicants in Sector 18, waiting for their category to open.
Uttara's third phase will not be judged by its plan, which was drawn a generation ago, but by its finish: the last roads in Sector 17, the last flats in Sector 18, and a lake that is finally walkable from end to end. The plan gave the area its shape. The next few years will decide whether it feels like a finished part of the city.
