Abstract
Unlike the developed ones, it is not easy for ill-resourced and weakly economized developing countries to plan and create a stand-alone policy to manage this urban amenity as mentioned in target 11.7 of SDG goals 2030. Especially It is still being considered as a luxury amenity by mass where the population burdened country like India is in shortage of ample space to put a roof over their head. Also, uneven distribution along with lack of dedicated planning policy and guidelines the availability limited to the affluent class. This resulted in a need to create a strategic framework of reorganizing existing open space and unlock the potential for new ones for public usage. Existing public space tool-kits recommended by UN habitat generalizes about the required policies for improvement. The provisions made in localized law helps complete the required regional and local variations accordingly. But lack of information provided in Smart-city plans and URDPFI guidelines are of no help to create a suitable local outcome. This project aims to take one of the oldest and most congested metro city Kolkata as a study area to create a user responsive model based open space strategy. Demographic, socio-economic and land use change affecting open space usage change in the city is assessed through secondary study. The updated database for existing open spaces is created through mapping in google earth and primary surveys are conducted in selected areas. Local categorization and hierarchy of open spaces are created followed by the extent of change in intended usage, accessibility, circle of importance. This gives an idea about the types and causes of various misuses occurring towards open spaces throughout the city, which in turn can help to create a list about open space condition, priority areas and specific types of interventions to be done at various levels to restore its original condition as much as possible. While deciding upon the priority list, user preferences and tendencies will be given importance by assessing footfall and user behavioral map, overlaid on the conditional database maps in ARCGIS. The study helps to indicate the vulnerable spaces of the city as hot spots to be treated as priority based approach and suggests to create required actions and targets to be taken in terms of area character and open spaces type for short, mid and long term period. This strategy not only points towards direct action, but also considers some indirect ones mainly at social level as required. It also points out potential future open space areas matching with the city land use. This model considers specific criteria which are applicable for urban context. Thus, it may not be able to produce desired result for rural and rural-urban fringe areas. Also for the cities having too low population densities and less variant land use character, this model would be comparatively ineffective.
