MANAGING URBAN GREEN COMMONS: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH FOR SUSTAINABLE DHAKA

Abstract

Collective governance and participation of stakeholders in community open spaces in an urban setting have potential benefits for both city dwellers and urban environment. Policy makers in different countries along with researchers and urban planners have successfully implemented this semi-formal approach in managing urban open spaces to build a resilient urban setting. Implementing common property system in a sensitive urban setting like Dhaka with a robust social and cultural structure would be complicated. But in a context where urban open spaces are decaying very fast and the authority is not as concerned as they should be; creating a sense of ownership in community and other stakeholders might trigger an opportunity to save urban open spaces and promote sustainability. The aim of this research is to shed a new light on urban open space management regime by proposing an integrated management framework involving community people and urban common property system. Together the open spaces and the management framework is referred as Urban Green Commons. Along with context study and literature reviews, physical status studies were done and examined potentiality of urban open spaces of Dhaka to become Urban Green Commons in the process. The emergence of this new notion of urban open spaces closely related to social and environmental crisis; hence, they can play a pivotal role to establish socially, environmentally and economically sustainable city. While there might be social and political aspects questioning the possibility of establishing Urban Green Commons, this research has considered the usefulness of the idea and how it can be established within a common institutional platform. As the research progressed it was established that the notion of Urban Green Commons is not a recognized system to manage urban greens in Dhaka and not all the urban greens can be examined with the concept at this time. With a structured framework that has been established at the end of this study, potential urban open spaces can be turned into UGC to start moving towards a sustainable Dhaka.