Mental mapping of diversified urban interaction spaces at residential areas in Dhaka

Abstract

The Community spaces fulfils “anthropological needs” of human beings. Dhaka is a living city with diverse lifestyle and people from all strata of society with different motivation. The city has different type of land use both planned and organic development which has grown from the need of dwellers. The primary human interaction space for the People living in planned residential areas are community parks and playfields. The organically developed areas of the city lack required number of parks, playfield yet found to be livelier and spontaneous in terms of human interactions and spatial relationships. The narrow alleyways, community kitchen and grocery shop become effective interaction space for the dweller, which has grown in terms of their need. This study attempts to compare the quality of the ‘interaction spaces’ of both planned residential areas and informal settlement area of Dhaka city by generating ‘Mental Map’ of the areas. The study uses Lynchian method in analysing city image and producing mental map of study areas. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has been used as a tool for visualizing spatially oriented qualitative data to produce ‘Mental Map’ of the areas. The study bestows an idea about the differences between the users’ satisfaction from provided public spaces and spontaneously growing path-space community interaction spaces.