Designing Public Space With[out] Public Participation?A Study on Hatir Jheel, Dhaka (original) (raw)

In a developing country like Bangladesh where the practice of urbanism is merely seen as either successful or miscarried milestones set by the government rather than an inclusive design process, it's not a surprise that the projects are often devoid of people's active involvement. However, the importance of including the users a space is designed for is undisputable, particularly from the perspective of New Urbanism concept advocating for 'citizen-based participatory planning and design' process. Public spaces are the urban connectors and points of reference in a city, thus rendering the design process as a better-suited opportunity to reflect the desires of its denizens. This paper investigates the unseen opportunities of public participation in sketching out the public spaces of Dhaka, taking Hatir Jheel as a case study. Hatir Jheel is a lake designed with the vision of connecting the existing traffic network to ease the congestion, retaining water, repelling pollution and illegal settlers along the waterbody and reinvigorating the urban activities on the waterfront. Despite having every potential to be an all-encompassing public urban design project realized from people's aspirations, Hatir Jheel doesn't live up to the expectations of becoming one. With the research question in mind 'What role can public participation have in designing public spaces?', this topic is explored in four sections, (1) literature review of the role of inclusive and participatory process in urbanism illustrated with two case studies in two different contexts, one in Belgium and another in Nepal, (2) public space as seen in the context of Dhaka, (3) the frequent breach between the above-mentioned concept and the reality, exemplified through the case study of Hatir Jheel and finally through these steps, (4) the paper aims to look for the recommendations for developing a toolkit to make participatory process in designing public space possible in developing countries. The paper concludes that in introducing the citizen engagement in the developing countries, public spaces can act as starting points and the planners should take the role of advocating and mediating people's needs.