Bridging the Urban Divide: A Critical Review of Bottom-Up Communicative Planning Measures in Bangladesh

Abstract

For any development initiative to be met, planning is crucial which involves choice making for societies and individuals to pursue the stated goals. Bangladesh, a rapidly growing country, faces several problems ranging from finding the effective ways of tackling urban poverty to deal with unplanned urbanization. The emergence of a bottom-up participatory approach reflecting the needs and demand of all social strata in the plan-making process is a far cry for countries like Bangladesh. However, despite strong and firm policy guidelines for enhancing the participatory planning approach, lack of strong role of city development authorities and communication gap, their bureaucratic decision making mind setup predominantly hinders the way to ensure pro-poor participation in policy making and people-centered planning in Bangladesh. Therefore, this particular research focuses on the investigation of necessity and manifestation of communicative rationale in the plan-making process, challenges as well as the level of participation required in the people-centered pro-poor planning in Bangladesh. The overarching methodological approach adopted for this study is case study approach including the interview of a local urban planner to recognize his own spatial needs, views on urban places as well as spatial footprints in the major cities of Bangladesh followed by his notion regarding the local and national plan-making process to generate a holistic view on the modes of planning in a developing country setup like Bangladesh. This study investigates the contemporary challenges faced by major metropolises in Bangladesh (Dhaka and Khulna with a high concentration of urban poor) to ensure the bottom-up participatory planning approach with a major focus on formulating effective pro-poor urban planning through engaging the people in the national policy-making process. The analysis and discussion uses an amalgamation of both primary and secondary databases through review of relevant literatures and interview of the key informant (Local Urban Planner). Findings demonstrate that, both in the plan-making and problem identification process, the participation of the urban poor, as well as general people, was negligible. This furthermore results in the failure of the national polices and priority setting process to address the demands and needs of the urban poor properly in Bangladesh. The findings of this study will act as a baseline for wider and growing pro-poor participatory planning literature.