, and Shaila Islam

Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: Khulna is the third largest thriving city of Bangladesh and surrounded by picturesque countryside, winding rivers, and a host of development centers. Since partition of British India in 1947, the city has been growing up as an important complex of trade, commerce and industries. This paper aims to relate the historical transformation of the morphology of the concern city by analyzing the spatial expansion. History reveals that the city arose as a market town on the bank of river Bhairab. At the very beginning of the paper, the Integration core has been tried to identify by analyzing the Master Plan of 1961. After identifying the initial urban core, the Master plan of 1993 & 2009 has been analyzed respectively by using Space Syntax, tool that simulates the likely social effects of urban designs, which has been done with axial analysis. It has been observed that the main Integration Core was initiated by the side of the river bank area as the river transports were the main catalysts for the City. Then with the time it shifted to the Dak-Bangla more/node, and now it has been found that the main vibrant nodal point is the Shib-Bari node