• What is already known. • New towns are widely employed to decentralize rapid urbanization in the Global South. • Purbachal is Bangladesh’s largest planned township designed to alleviate Dhaka’s extreme congestion. • Existing research often overlooks the institutional dynamics that drive the gap between planning and implementation. • What this paper adds. • Conceptually frames the project as ‘performative decentralization’, where planning rhetoric masks centralized elite power. • Links governance failures to unsustainable urban sprawl and ecological degradation. • Reveals that without inclusive institutional reforms, new towns inevitably reproduce the social stratification they aim to solve. Dhaka, ranked as one of the world’s least liveable cities, requires urgent spatial decentralization. The Purbachal New Town project was initiated as Bangladesh’s largest planned township to alleviate the pressure by establishing a self-sustained urban core. However, there has been no in-depth examination of the implementation in relation to the objectives of the project. This study fills this important gap by offering the first comprehensive and multi-source assessment of the performance of Purbachal, linking its governance and spatial outcomes directly to its decentralization objectives. Prioritizing deep insight over broad statistics, a multi-thematic assessment framework was employed, triangulating three data sources: official planning documents, in-depth Key Informant Interviews (N = 7) with professional planners, and systematic validation interviews (N = 68) with residents and original landowners. Data were thematically coded using ATLAS.ti software, and 11 key themes were identified. The results show that while Purbachal’s plan follows international standards for layout and utilities, its implementation is undermined by broad institutional, governance, and social shortcomings. The project is failing to achieve its core decentralization goals, evidenced by ’elite capture’ in plot allotment, weak accountability, and a fundamental lack of local employment integration. This study conceptually frames this failure as ’performative decentralization’. The findings offer critical, replicable insights for urban planning policy in the Global South, highlighting how governance failures ultimately drive unsustainable urban sprawl and ecological degradation.
Mahfuj et al. (Wed,) studied this question.