Evaluating Urban Services in Neighbourhoods Through the Inequality Lens in Khulna City, Bangladesh: A Geographic Information System Approach

Abstract

This article delineates the development of an integrated assessment tool to understand inequality in the provision of urban services among neighbourhoods in Khulna city, Bangladesh. The study considers eight key indicators to evaluate basic urban services related to the physical environment of the city. We use primary and secondary sources of information as well as geographic information system (GIS) to summarise the results in a scientific fashion. Additionally, we adopt the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique to distribute weights among the considered indicators and categorise the neighbourhoods as ‘good’, ‘average’ or ‘poor’ in terms of service availability. Results from the study demonstrate that a majority of the neighbourhoods lack basic urban services. Only 10 per cent of the neighbourhoods are equipped with basic urban services, whereas 74 per cent face difficulties with ‘average’ quality of services and nearly 16 per cent of neighbourhoods fail to provide basic services to city dwellers. Our study may be useful to development authorities, city corporations and local governments to visualise the neighbourhoods struggling for basic urban services and bring them under immediate attention to deliver the required resources. Further, the study provides an assessment model to understand urban service inequality in cities with similar characteristics in other parts of the world.