(Ebook) Empowering the Urban Poor through Participatory Planning Process: A Case from Jhenaidah, Bangladesh by Dr. MAHMUDA ALAM, Mrs. EMERALD UPOMA BAIDYA ISBN 9780203849132, 0203849132

(Ebook) Empowering the Urban Poor through Participatory Planning Process: A Case from Jhenaidah, Bangladesh by Dr. MAHMUDA ALAM, Mrs. EMERALD UPOMA BAIDYA ISBN 9780203849132, 0203849132

The paper analyses a community development project based in Jhenaidah,Bangladesh, which evolved through broadening social capital among slumcommunities and formal institutions in order to bring positive socio-spatialchanges in the neighborhoods. Till date, nine disadvantaged communities haveformed a network for city-wide community development, have started to buildand manage their own funds, built better houses for themselves, and throughthis process have managed to draw attention and support from the localgovernment. Started by a small group of architects and a local NGO in 2015,and still broadening its scopes, this project can be regarded as a successfulexample of people-led development initiative, especially in a context where mostdevelopment projects exercise limited participatory values and are dominatedby unequal power dynamics. Hence issues like scaling up and economicsustainability still concern those, who can see the community-drivendevelopment process with an unbiased attitude. The overarching goal of thisarticle is to sketch out these issues with the help of empirical understandingsfrom the field and theoretical findings from literature on social innovation andpower in planning in order to understand how to work balance between localand institutional management of projects in order to avoid perceiving bottomup and top-down initiatives in a dualistic manner.JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY URBAN AFFAIRS (2019), 3(2), 47-54.https://doi.org/10.25034/ijcua.2018.4700