Caring urban vision ‘crucial to attain middle-income status’

Speakers at a workshop underscored the need for a big push for a more caring urban vision as Bangladesh aims to attain middle- income status and tackle the challenges of climate change.
Cities are either becoming refuge of the desperate or only temporary stations for income-earning, they said.
Urban expansion in contemporary Bangladesh is happening without empathy or responsibility, they added.
The two-day workshop on 'Climate Migration, Informal Settlements and Urban Well-being' ended at a city hotel on Thursday. PPRC in collaboration with the University of Oxford-PEAK Urban Research Programme organised the event.
A cross-section of urban stakeholders from academia, NGOs, civil society, city government, government agencies and development partners participated in the workshop.
Projects to improve urban public spaces often end up restricting public access to such spaces. Such contradictory trends are multiplying as migration including accelerating urbanisation and climate migration is set to fuel further unplanned expansion of urban agglomerations and create expanded challenges for urban well-being, speakers added.
The session was co-moderated by Hossain Zillur Rahman, executive chairman of the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC) and Prof Michael Keith, director, PEAK Urban Research Programme at University of Oxford, UK.
Mr Rahman announced the launch of the Bangladesh Urban Knowledge Hub.
The new initiative is expected to provide a stronger and agenda-based engagement of doers, thinkers and policy-makers to realise the goals of sustainable cities and urban well-being through specific and well-defined activities.
Among others, Farah Kabir of Action Aid, Prof Saleemul Huq of ICCCAD, Dipankar Roy of Statistics and Informatics Division, Syed Ashraf of DDM, Bhawani Buswala and Prof Tim Schwanen of University of Oxford, Mohammad Abdul Wazed of PPRC, Prof Mainul Islam of Dhaka University, Prof Sujaul Khan of NSU, Prof Syed M Hashemi of BRAC University, Dr Shilpi Roy of Khulna University, Dr Liakath Ali of Brac Urban Program, and Saad Ben Mostafa of Department of Architecture attended the session.