Volume 8 Issue 1
Urban Morphological Change Analysis of Dhaka City, Bangladesh, Using Space Syntax
Bayes Ahmed, Rakibul Hasan and K. M. Maniruzzaman
1Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR), Department of Earth Sciences, University College London (UCL), Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
2Department of Spatial Planning and Development, Umeå University, Umeå 90187, Sweden
3Department of Urban and Regional Planning, College of Architecture and Planning, University of Dammam, P.O. Box 2397, Dammam 31451, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This article is based on a study of the morphological changes of Dhaka City, the capital of Bangladesh. The main objective of the research is to study the transformation of urban morphology in Dhaka City from 1947 to 2007. Three sample wards (18, 19 and 72) of Dhaka City Corporation are strategically selected as the study areas. Ward 72 has an indigenous type of organic settlement, whereas ward 19 is a planned area, and ward 18 represents a mixed (both planned and informal) type of settlement. In this research, the transformation of urban settlement pattern is examined through space syntax. The results show that the organic settlements (ward 72) are highly integrated both in terms of the local and global syntactic measures (lowest standard deviation for local and global integration, with the highest intelligibility values), and are more connectivity. The scenario is opposite in the case of planned settlements. The characteristics of mixed areas (ward 18) lie in between the organic and planned settlements. Therefore, in summary, it can be stated that the integration, connectivity and intelligibility measures of Dhaka City are found to be high, medium and low for the indigenous, mixed and planned settlement types; respectively.
Keywords:urban morphology; space syntax; settlement pattern; street network; urban planning; GIS; Dhaka