Accessibility to Public Open Space of a densely populated city: a case study of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract The massive growth in economy and population, accompanied by the rapid urbanization has severely compromised the allocation of urban green open spaces in Dhaka Metropolitan City. Consequently, the provision of Public Open Space (POS) was also adversely affected. Urban planners must ascertain the existing degree of accessibility to tackle imminent urbanization. With this concern in mind, this study evaluates the accessibility to POS of Dhaka with a discriminative scoring method referred to as the Accessibility Index, which enables interregional comparison and represents a broad spectrum of accessibility throughout the city. The Accessibility Index was evaluated based on the nearest distance to POS using Network Analysis, which determined actual walking distance. This approach established a citywide benchmark for POS accessibility. Results revealed that southwest and central regions that include Old Dhaka, Dhanmondi, Hatirjheel, Banani and Gulshan exhibited great accessibility. Uttara and Mirpur also saw favorable results, whereas most other regions recorded low scores. Based on our assessment, only about 0.066 acre of POS is available per 1000 people, covering just 1.26% of the city’s land area, signifying great shortage in POS. The findings of this research will provide valuable insights for urban planners and policy makers in planning the future expansion of open space facilities. Furthermore, the methodology employed in this study is relatively easy to replicate while producing realistic results, therefore, it can serve as an exemplary measure for researchers to implement when more refined and updated databases become available.