Planning Provisions of Urban Active Recreation Spaces: A Study of Children's Playground Provisions in Residential Areas of Mysore

Although it is often the residual category in statutory land use planning, allocated only after residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation requirements have been satisfied, active recreation space for children, especially neighborhood play grounds, is a fundamental component of child health, development, and the right to play. Using the Revised Master Plan (Revision-II) 2031 created by the Mysore Urban Development Authority (MUDA) as the main source document, this study investigates the planning provisions for urban active recreation space in the residential areas of Mysore city, with particular reference to the provision of children's playgrounds. The study examines the Development Control Regulations that control playground reservation in new residential layouts and within individual building plots, extracts and analyzes data on open space allocation across the 45 planning districts of the Mysore-Nanjangud Local Planning Area, and compares the Master Plan's provisions to national and international recreational space standards, such as the Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation (URDPFI) Guidelines, 2014 and World Health Organization benchmarks. The results demonstrate that only 5.51 percent of the planned 2031 Mysore urban conurbation is made up of open space, including parks and playgrounds, which is significantly less than the per-capita standards suggested by the URDPFI Guidelines. Additionally, the amount of open space provided varies greatly amongst planning districts, with some purely residential districts reporting open space shares of less than 3%. Although the Master Plan's Subdivision Regulations require a minimum 10% reservation for parks, open spaces, and playgrounds in new layouts, this requirement is applied prospectively to new subdivisions and is not retrofitted to the substantial stock of residential areas that have already been developed, creating a structural gap in children's access to playgrounds in older neighbourhoods. Recommendations for population-linked, hierarchical play space criteria and retrofitting procedures for underprivileged residential planning areas are made in the paper's conclusion.