Housing and Public Works Minister Zakaria Taher Sunday said the government's goal is not centralised urbanisation but decentralised, balanced urban and regional development.
The minister made the remarks at a seminar titled "Introducing a Uniform Spatial Planning System in Bangladesh," organised by the Urban Development Directorate (UDD) under the Ministry of Housing and Public Works at Segunbagicha in the city to mark World Town Planning Day 2026.
"Work is underway to prepare master plans for every city corporation and district in the country to ensure sustainable urbanisation. Alongside plans to develop secondary townships around Dhaka, the Urban Development Directorate has, for the first time, adopted a 10-year plan. It will be extended step by step, from metropolitan cities down to the upazila level," the minister said.
Housing, he noted, means more than four walls – it encompasses safe water, electricity, sanitation, public transport, education, healthcare, employment and an environment for a life of dignity.
The minister said the Spatial Planning Act, 2026 has been enacted with priority on sustainable development, economic growth, biodiversity conservation, climate and disaster resilience, and the protection of agriculture and the environment. "Under the law, the UDD will prepare national and regional spatial plans and develop the policy framework."
The keynote paper presented at the seminar noted that several agencies, including RAJUK, CDA, KDA, RDA, CoxDA, LGED, city corporations and the UDD, are currently preparing spatial plans under their own legal bases and terms of reference (ToR).
Although they conduct similar surveys, the agencies' final outputs differ in climate and disaster risk management strategies, land use, map scales and data formats, it said.
As a result, integrating planning data into the SDG tracker has become complicated, and overlapping mandates have emerged in government work at the national and regional levels.
To resolve the problem, the UDD has drafted a proposal for a "Uniform Spatial Planning System," which will bring uniformity to all agencies' survey methods, data standards, map scales, land-use classifications and approval procedures.
The UDD has set a target of preparing spatial plans for the country as a whole and for all districts by 2035. To that end, it recommended preparing ToR, a rate schedule, adopting uniform planning standards and a map scheme, defining an institutional framework, and building local-level planning capacity.
World Town Planning Day was launched in 1949 by Carlos María della Paolera, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and a graduate professor at the Institute of Urbanism in Paris.
Observed worldwide on November 8 each year to promote the idea of eco-friendly urban development, this year's theme is "Great communities are built on planning."