Accessible, Safe, and Playable? Urban Open Spaces and Their Suitability for Children in Dhaka City (Bangladesh, 2026)

The study introduces a suitability framework that assesses open space across four dimensions children themselves identify as decisive, such as the safety of the route, the play value of what is inside, inclusivity for girls and children with disabilities, and the governance regime that determines who may enter and what they may do there. On each dimension, spaces that appear adequate in planning statistics prove unusable in practice. Only 22.6 percent of children report facilities their disabled peers can use. Ultimately, the study argues that expanding the stock of open space will not by itself secure children’s right to play and that provision, protection, and management must be treated as a single problem rather than three.