Abstract
About a quarter of the world population presently lives in smaller urban centres. Based on population, these centres are defined as ‘small’, ‘midsized’ or ‘secondary’, while they receive little attention from urban studies compared to the World/Global cities. Also, within sustainable planning/design scholarship, only a few materials that adequately theorise these cities’ many socio-spatial-environmental crises are available. Generic categories/theories like ‘small’, ‘secondary’ or ‘ordinary’ do not explain these either. A caveat of ‘intermediateness’ hence emerges here, highlighting how spatial planning/design struggles to make decisions and prioritise interventions in these cities from the many prevailing binary conditions (like growth or nature-preservation; or globalisation or cultural identity). It adds to these smaller cities’ already existing ‘intermediate’ position in how they resemble World/Global cities in many ways yet remain outside of global urban discourses. Based on these observations, this research asks which conjectural lens might enable understanding particular spatio-social-environmental dilemmas for planning these smaller cities? With empirical findings from Benapole, Bangladesh, this research identifies several planning dilemmas articulated in four binary themes: ‘nature versus development’, ‘growth versus sustainability’, ‘regional/transboundary priorities versus local needs’ ‘local versus global identity’. For decision-making, this spatio-demographic-environmental intermediateness made the planning of various sectors/scales quite uncertain at Benapole. Therefore, even when spatial/physical plans were produced, they remained primarily uncoordinated and sectoral. The idea of ‘intermediate’ hence emerges through these four conceptual and spatial dilemmas and tentativeness, which question the definition of cities based on population only. ‘Intermediateness’ also indicates the lack of sustainability in urbanism/urbanisation.
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Notes
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Municipalities (Pourasava) in Bangladesh are categorized into three types: A, B and C, based on the minimum of annual revenues collected over last three years (indicating their level of urbanization).
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One of the oldest and historically significant road networks in the ancient world that connected many nations, kingdoms and civilizations of South and South-west Asia as early as 4th C BCE.
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Acknowledgements
The authors extend their appreciation to MScHS 2017 Design Studio students, Architecture Discipline, Khulna University for collecting field data and producing drawings, and gratitude to the UDD, GoB for providing data and partial funding.
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Hakim, S.S., Ahmed, S.K. (2022). The Intermediate City: Context, Pluralism and Planning Dilemmas. In: Rosso, F., Morea, D., Pribadi, D.O. (eds) Innovations in Green Urbanization and Alternative Renewable Energy. Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07381-6_7
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