Improving Liveability Through Regenerating Informal Neighbourhoods: A Case of Old Dhaka, Bangladesh

Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, has been the world’s most densely inhabited city since 2016, with a density of 30,093 people/km2 in 2022, posing challenges in providing access to basic civic facilities to its residents. The planning history of Dhaka reveals that both planned and spontaneously developed neighbourhoods have evolved here throughout time. Besides these two distinct types of development, the historic older part of Dhaka with all its cultural and social heritage has expanded within its physical limit. Consequently, citizens’ liveability conditions in Old Dhaka characterized by the low standard of urban services, narrow road networks, poor drainage systems and congested urban fabric, have steadily worsened over time. A new Detailed Area Plan (DAP) has recently been restructured and published to develop Dhaka into a better liveable city, resolving its urban challenges, ensuring citizens’ equity proportionate to urban amenities, upgrading urban services, and gradually improving the physical, social, economic and environmental condition of different areas. Engaging locals during the fieldwork, this study attempts to identify the existing problems, their experience living with these challenges and the aspirations of the locality regarding the new urban regeneration proposal of DAP. Several participatory approaches were exercised, including focus group discussions, key informant interviews, transect walks and community mapping of the existing conditions and two urban design workshops were conducted with 50 participants to demonstrate the urban regeneration proposals of DAP for two Old Dhaka neighbourhoods. This paper suggests solutions in terms of policy and design to provide a liveable environment for the locals in terms of physical infrastructure, amenities and facilities while conserving the socio-cultural fabric of the neighbourhoods. This study concludes that balancing top-down and bottom-up approaches in design solutions can ensure liveability not only in terms of physical outcomes but also regenerate the embedded socio-cultural aspects of these neighbourhoods.