Role of Major Services and Facilities in Shaping Urban Transformation in Khulna

Rapid urban growth in secondary cities often creates uneven service landscapes that quietly steer where people settle, invest, and convert land. In Bangladesh, most studies on service driven transformation concentrate on Dhaka and other primate cities, leaving limited evidence on cities like Khulna. This research examines the distribution and typology of essential urban services within the Khulna Development Authority master plan area and evaluates how these patterns influence land use change and population concentration between 2018 and 2025. The study is grounded in Spatial Information Theory, which treats services as spatial signals that shape behaviour, perceived opportunity, and location choice, and is supported by a critical realist reading of institutional power behind spatial outcomes. Two objectives guide the analysis. The first identifies the spatial distribution pattern of major services and facilities across DADP zones. The second assesses the causal relationship between service geographies and urban transformation.

A mixed methods strategy was applied to ensure both spatial precision and human grounding. Quantitative analysis used Location Quotient to measure service specialization, Entropy Index to assess diversity, Moran’s I to detect clustering, Service Area Analysis to evaluate accessibility, and the Dissimilarity Index to examine equity of distribution. Land use and land cover change was derived through remote sensing classification and change detection for 2018 and 2025. These spatial results were
triangulated with household surveys and key informant interviews to capture lived experiences
of access, cost burden, and everyday mobility.
Findings reveal a sharply polarized service geography. Core and corridor linked zones form
high intensity service nodes concentrating education, healthcare, utilities, transport, and
commerce, while peripheral and environmentally sensitive zones remain structurally under served. Urbanisation rates ranging from minus 2.43 to 12.79 show that the fastest growth occurs where service concentration and accessibility are already strongest, reinforcing monocentric expansion. Land use results confirm rapid service linked conversion, with built up land increasing by 21.24 percent from 38.09 km² in 2018 to 46.18 km² in 2025. Transformation follows a bidirectional pathway. In several zones, service expansion leads densification and mixed-use growth. In others, land conversion occurs first and services arrive reactively, embedding inequality early in the growth cycle. Interpreted through Spatial Information Theory, these patterns show that services act as spatial forces rather than passive outcomes of development. Overall, the study concludes that Khulna’s transformation is being structured by unequal service geographies amplified by institutional and market dominance. To align with SDG 11, planning must shift toward service led compact growth, stronger inter agency coordination, and equity-based decentralization within future DAP revisions. The thesis contributes a replicable mixed methods framework for diagnosing service driven land transitions in Bangladesh’s secondary cities.

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