Can Dhaka be liveable and sustainable? The complexities and dilemmas of planning and planners for achieving urban liveability and sustainability

Liveability and sustainability have become central organising categories and fundamental aspirations in contemporary urban planning and practice. This study seeks to understand the complexities and dilemmas of planning, and of planners, in delivering liveable and sustainable cities from the perspective of the Global South through Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, as a case. Liveability and sustainability are two interlocked concepts, but their interconnections and tensions have received limited research attention in the scholarly literature of urban planning, policy and practice. The rationale of this study rests on the notion that concepts like liveability and sustainability in planning are not simply normative values but embed localised governance issues, fundamental planning dilemmas and that liveability-sustainability itself is under-researched in some contexts. The thesis builds on these theoretical and practical gaps, contributing by empirically investigating urban development planning in Dhaka, focussing on wetlands and transport planning issues. One emerging discussion in the planning literature from the Global South foregrounds how planning practices challenge universalised planning ideas that originate from different contexts. Planning theorists and practitioners interested in or working in the Global South accentuate the situated planning context instead of claiming to generate universal urban theory. This study contributes to this emerging discussion of planning ideas of the Global South. Taking an interpretive philosophical position, this case study research presents interviews from thirty-one urban planners and practitioners in Dhaka to surface their views and experiences in delivering liveability and sustainability. Document analyses has supplemented the interpretive data drawn from the interviews. The study identifies how power, competing rationalities, technical expertise and financial motivation of various governance actors intersect and form a constellation of complexities and dilemmas shaping planning processes and outcomes around liveability and sustainability. The findings validate the analytical framework developed for this study. Planning outcomes towards a liveable and sustainable city in the urban context of the Global South are shaped through the following three interacting premises: i) understanding liveability-sustainability concepts; ii) intrinsic dilemmas in planning practices; and iii) localised governance issues. Specifically, Dhaka’s urban development planning practice is not participatory, accountable, transparent or well-coordinated. The poverty reduction and economic growth and modernisation-centric rationalities of state political, bureaucratic and technical elites, as well as the private interests of powerful actors from both the public and private sectors, are dominating Dhaka’s planning context. This has shifted planning power from planners to a multi-locus of powerful actors with competing rationalities and interests. Planners find it challenging to embrace and imprint their orthodoxy and aspirations of achieving a liveable and sustainable city. The planner’s role as a rational expert (rational technical planning), or as communicative or collaborative expert (communicative or collaborative planning) is thus at odds with Dhaka’s planning context and processes. The tendency for western modernisation and neoliberal city ideals held by different elites and the ways that liveability and sustainability are situated as vehicles for achieving them are mismatched with Dhaka’s inherent bio-physical and socio-political characteristics and its democratic maturity. This, in turn, gives rise to a complex post-political condition through a combined force of constricted democratic practice and neoliberal thought, suppressing planning experts in particular, and democratic participation more generally. While political contention regarding the current planning practice does emerge, it remains insignificant in overcoming the existing tendency of post-political planning in Dhaka, where such debates are often ignored. As a result, Dhaka is becoming an environmentally unsustainable and socially unequal and unjust citycreating intra and intergenerational equity tensions. The conclusion is that Dhaka’s planners and planning practitioners hold onto a universal view of good urban planning, yet operate in a context that makes delivery of this vision hard. This analysis of urban liveability-sustainability planning through the lens of the Global South appreciates that the idea of liveability-sustainability, urban planning and planners’ difficulties are not alike in as many ways as mainstream planning theories and liveability-sustainability understandings might suggest. Therefore, this study offers new insights into planning ideas and practices from a Global South perspective that can improve the explanatory power of mainstream planning theories and practices in challenging contexts.