problems of bara bazar

- traffic
Road encroachment is one of the prime reasons for traffic jam and chaotic movement of traffic in Barobazaar.
There are no parking spaces on the roads whereas all roads are used for loading / unloading purpose.
- river erosion
One of the main causes of deterioration of the economic activities of the Barobazaar area is river erosion.
The main market area has been severely eroded during the last several years and these areas are still under the threat of erosion.
Many land with both permanent and temporary structures were destroyed because of high land erosion without any protection measures.
Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) can be an important actor in trying to solve this problem. They invest money under the name ‘Secondary Towns Integrated Flood Protection Project’.

source:
thesis (discipline of urban & rural planning, school of science, engineering and technology, Khulna University): Syed Shahriar Amin, Redevelopment of Barobazaar, Khulna, September 1999

trainlink India-Bangladesh

FRAMEWORK FOR GUIDING URBANISATION

TOOL SCHEME - final

pro forma, the final relation scheme

VISION SUMMARY

Story summary

From the readings on different scales, top down and bottom up, there are some issue that are crucial in improving and complementing the current situation of the urban environment:

1. flooding
The lower lands flood easily according to tides, heavy rainfall etc. while the higher lands are protected depending on their height. Mostly, the higher lands are the spaces for the formal settlements and the lower lands are, because of the flood risk, infiltrated by informal settlements.

2. lack of services
There is prominent lack of basic services such as schools, hospitals etc.

3. water contamination
The water, rivers as well as the water ponds, are polluted in a way that they no longer support the kind of cycle they should work for.
Contaminated water is taken from river and pond and used for different uses, while in the meantime waste water is being dumped in the river again. There is a net pollution of the river. This works the same way for the river ponds which even integrate an extra use in terms of productivity, rice or shrimp. These activities can also have polluting effect on the soil because of salinity.

(4.) mangrove disappearance
There is a threat for the mangrove to disappear if not properly defended.

From the different scales, different approaches are extracted that work not only within its original scale, but work on all scales.

AFFORESTATION
This comes from the country scale reading and looking at the history of the mangrove forest. Since there was a cyclone, a lot of the mangrove has vanished, therefore an afforestation process has been set up, clearing money for returning some of the destroyed mangrove. (best defence is the offence)

Afforestation can work on the different scale:

economic generator, paper mill revival
ecological balance
reinforcing the water edge
reducing salinity
water purification

This idea of afforestation can be extended to the city, not only mangrove.

RECLAIMING SEDIMENT
Caption of sediment is embedded in the history of Bangladesh, so we are not inventing anything new, coming from bigger scale, but also on a lower scale. The siltation is a process that start from way upstream, but the caption itself is a small scale intervention to manipulate the landscape. It can be a powerful tool:

brick factories
fertile ground for productive landscape
land filling, creating highland and lowland

WATER PURIFICATION
To solve the water pollution, a water purification system is needed. This can be done by aerated lagoons, or thinking of a purification system of connecting water ponds. These are two ways of different scales. But also the mangrove trees can help for purifying water.


These three different tools all work to solve the problems that we have seen, but they do even more. Now only the landscape elements are considered, but in fact, the landscape in Bangladesh is also the infrastructure, the base for urbanization.
We can use the reclaiming of the sediment to introduce a strategy of land filling with different gradients of height according to what is supposed to be more protected, or less protected from flooding. In that way, by defining strategic places, we can melt into the urban tissue certain key services that can enhance the urban quality.
This strategy does not only work on the city scale, but it can be projected onto the region in the sense that we start defining where higher land, lower land can be. The private market, or the state, can then do whatever they want on the defined land fills. Heighten it, build whatever…
We can also reflect this back on the issues we addressed in the fieldwork! The informal/formal structure, front and back of the river, permeability to river on city scale, but also on regional scale etc. Using the highland/lowland allows us to keep open spaces, or change permeability…

A lot to be further deliberate on and connecting the different effects of the tools in the sense that it helps urbanization, landscape and infrastructure, and as well an economy.

The scheme above is very complicated, it is a fast draft of the way the visions relate to the things they do, and to show that we create a sort of balance in terms of urbanization, infrastructure and landscape, and as well economy. It is very hard to read, just first draft.

Pre Mid-Review

Dear All,

I have been deliberating over our discussions on wednesday. i am still unclear on what is the overall vision/ strategy that we have for the urban region of khulna. what is our standpoint as an office? i feel that to be better able to orient the analysis we are doing, it would help to formulate this; to me, we already have reached several scenarios and viewpoints as a result of intensive fieldwork and our present analysis could therefore be more oriented towards elucidated this vision that we want to develop. i am attaching a jpeg that i made to clarify for myself, what our various standpoints have been so far and what are the possible strategies that we have been saying we could implement... maybe we could deliberate on this tomorrow?

there are also some questions that i have related to this...

1. How are we negotiating the scenario of rural + urban = (rur)ban vis avis and vision/ strategy for the city and region?
2. Any strategic (spatial) plan requires an overview of stakeholder and powerholders - who are these in Khulna? what role do they play? (spatially of course)
3. What is the role/ position of the university? it was introduced specifically to boost the city as a learning centre - is it important to consider it in our deliberations?

there are more questions that will still come up...

i hope these are relevant...

anything new?