Productive Community Space in urban slum setting through community driven approaches: Ralir Bagan slum, Khulna as a case

Abstract:

Community open space is scarcer in the slum or informal settlement worldwide, while they are already vulnerable to cramped living spaces. NGOs and Government are particularly keen to upgrade the physical infrastructures focusing on the water, sanitation, and drain facilities through mostly the top-down approaches. Although such upgrading approaches might meet the basic needs of the communities, very few come forward to uphold the actual meaning of life through upgrading the community's physical assets like community space. The study, therefore, prioritized developing productive community space in a slum setting. The study's primary aim was to transform it into a productive community space to serve the multifunctionalities. Raleigh began a highly congested slum; Khulna was taken as a case study where we adopted the community-driven development process to develop community space used for dumping community waste for a decade. Community-led approaches are considered unbiased for their inclusiveness and innovations process of capacity building and empowerment of the participants. Sixty women and 40 adolescents were chosen as key stakeholders, who actively attended the multiple sessions: focus group discussion, design workshop, and the construction phases. Several dialogs sharing sessions were also conducted with local Government personnel (City councilor, Mayor and MP) and NGOs. Findings reveal that communities are largely utilizing the newly designed community space for mainly social and economic purposes. Adolescents and women are the key users of the newly designed space for their regular activities. In contrast, male slum dwellers are also considering the space as a wayfinding community-based enterprise. Surprisingly, the community achieved a sense of permeance / political power (tenure security) after installing the newly designed community space. Even they showed fearless attitudes against slum eviction by the local authorities. The study highlights a need for understanding the co-creation with communities' specifically women and children who were the key victims of the facilities and amenities scarcity in the slum. Expectantly the study will gravely take the attention of the built environment professionals and NGOs in their planning and policies for developing the physical environment of slum or informal settlement.

Keywords: Community space; physical infrastructure; community-driven approaches; capacity building; empowerment; slum.