Creating active living communities through public open space planning: a case study of Bhopal

Abstract

Public Open Spaces (POS) define and bring the communities together for their interaction and active living. They play a very important role in promoting active living. The level of healthiness of a city and its residents can be indirectly measured through the quality of public open spaces that the city is offering to its citizens. Looking at Indian cities in this context, the statistics indicate that, the POS(s) present are very inadequate in number, as well as size. Moreover the quality of these POS(s) is very poor and badly maintained. Keeping these problems in mind, the study aims at improving the utilization of public open spaces in Indian cities. The quality of public open spaces and its utilization level depends upon its management system. In order to understand the system of Public Open Spaces, hierarchy(s) of public open spaces has been studied from various National and International case studies. Accordingly, a suitable model of hierarchy of Public Open Spaces for the Indian cities has been established and rest of the study has been conducted based on this model. Along with the hierarchical model, few parameters which effect the utilization of POS are parallelly covered in the study. Focusing mainly on active living, to identify the community‘s needs and demands of activities, an activity preference survey has been conducted, wherein the people were asked to mark their preferred leisure, recreational & sport activities and preferred level of activity location. Based on the public‘s opinion, activities have been allocated at different levels of Public Open Spaces. After the allocation of activities at different levels, a suitability analysis at neighborhood level has been conducted as there are multiple number of public open spaces present in the neighborhood, i.e., at the same level. Based on few parameters, suitability analysis is conducted using weighted overlay method. This thesis is proposing a hierarchical model of Public Open Spaces which can be adopted by all the Indian cities/towns for their better management. Apart from this, a methodology is worked out for the allocation of activities at different levels of POS(s) and also, allocation of activities at the same level of POS when there are multiple options present.