Urban Renewal in the Traditional Center of a Mega City: A Case Study of Shankhari Bazar, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Inner city urban blight is a prevalent area of research in particularly in the industrialized Northern cities. There are also significant scientific discussions on characterizing inner city urban blight, which is usually associated with unemployment, poverty, depopulation and social exclusion, and empirical work to address this problem. But compared to the Northern cities, similar research in the Global South shows a low profile, and even much lower in the South Asian region that accommodates a substantial number of mega cities. City cores are the most densely populated area and very important business and industrial zone in case of South and also South East Asian cities, unlike North American or European inner cities. These City cores could be generally characterized with poor housing condition, buildings of heritage value, inadequate and poor quality of urban services, deteriorating physical environment and sometimes also social problems. Thus, urban renewal in this context requires a review of traditional approaches. This research concentrates on urban renewal to address urban blight in the historical city core of Dhaka, a South Asian mega city. This is a qualitative and exploratory research using a single case study in detail, which is a small street called Shankhari Bazar in old Dhaka. beside the literature, information is collected through semi structured interviews, group discussion and workshops with different stakeholders, participant observation and relevant legal documents. This research aims at improving the living condition of the traditional city center in the megacity of Dhaka, which is considered as a blighted area in the planning documents and also perceived as well as recognized to be blighted largely in the professional and academic field. To do that, it has taken the course of investigating a number of issues. Such as, understanding the urban blight features in Dhaka, driving forces that foster urban blight to set in neighborhoods, relevant examples of urban renewal in South and South-East Asian cities, hurdles that check improvement of blight situation, role of different actors in different perspectives such as fostering, addressing and fighting urban blight as well as their role, capacity and willingness in improving the situation. The results identify the intricate complexity of the local socio-cultural-political-administrative setup and indicates the difficulty of large scale intervention. Instead, the study identifies the scopes where interventions are required and possible to achieve meaningful improvement with minimal mediation. Although the research focuses on the inner city of Dhaka but it also considers the wider regional scale and includes similar conditions in a few historical cities in South Asia. Consequently, the results of this study are also relevant for the regional scale to varying extent if not exactly