Who will Decongest Bengaluru? Politics, Infrastructures & Scapes

ABSTRACT

The main objective of this paper is to investigate deliberate instances of the unclogging of congested urban infrastructures through such measures as widening roads and constructing underpasses. Such decongestive actions have increasingly become routine in the burgeoning cities of the Global South. The city of Bengaluru, India’s hub for business process outsourcing and for new information technology innovation and entrepreneurship, provides an apt location to examine and excavate the political connotations of decongestive work. In doing so, this paper proposes infrastructure scape as an explanatory concept to describe three facets of decongestive efforts in Bengaluru – first, the organizing principle that assembles them, second, the technological sensibility that constitute these efforts, and finally the value commitments that each scape proposes.

Keywords:

• congestion
• politics
• cities
• Bengaluru
• India

Notes

1. Bengaluru (or Bangalore as it was known prior to November 2006) is the fifth largest city in the country with a population of about 8 million in 2011. Its status as India’s ‘city of the future’ is reinforced by its emergence as a hub of business process outsourcing and technological innovation and entrepreneurship with a Technology Achievement Index of 13 (Sudhira, Ramachandra, and Bala Subramanya 2007). The epithet of ‘city of the future’ is also apposite for a city that according to some appears artificially a historical with the past absent in any dialogue about the present (Pani 2010). This is despite Bengaluru’s fractured sociospatial landscape points to a history of migration to the city by various cultural communities.

2. Comprehending the contested nature of the relation between modernity and technology is of utility here. Modernity as a macro-level, abstract theoretical construct justifies the incorporation of rationalization as a practice enhancing a culture of calculation and control within social and cultural processes (Feenberg 2010). Although, technology has been considered a distinctive embodiment of modernity, viewing technology as solely a product of a global logic of modernistic rationality, overlooks (what technology studies have conclusively demonstrated through micro-level empirical studies) the multiple ways through which technology is shaped and embedded within social, political and cultural choices and settings (Brey 2003; Misa 2003).

3. One axis of sociospatial fragmentation in Bengaluru is colonial in origin and was a product of an urban landscape that was linguistically divided with most Kannada speakers clustered in the native ‘City’ section, whereas Tamil speakers were in a majority in the British ‘Cantonment.’ Although this division does have resonances in the nature of infrastructure access, especially in the immediate post-colonial period (Nair 2005), in contemporary times, the proliferating sociospatial fragmentation, linguistic politics have been largely subsumed within the idioms and negotiations of political society, at least in the context of infrastructure access.

4. An infrastructurescape as a socio-technical assemblage has important parallels with Actor Network Theory (Latour 2005). These parallels are evident in the heterogeneity of construction materials that are employed and the heterogeneous engineering (Law 1987) used to assemble both actor networks and infrastructurescapes. Where they diverge is in the explicit perspectival and spatial orientation of infrasctructurescapes. Such an orientation in infrasctructurescapes makes it an invaluable concept to understand fluid phenomenon such as congestion and decongestion.

5. It is worth noting that the infrastructurescape is mobilized by the Government of Karnataka rather than the city government of Bengaluru (the Bruhath Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP)). Customarily city governments across India have been subsidiary political formations, constituted with a limited role in policy production or infrastructure development (Gopakumar 2012). Consistent with this trend, key directions regarding infrastructure are proposed by the Sarkar rather than BBMP.

6. Para-statal bodies such as the Bangalore Development Authority, Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board, Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, Bangalore Metropolitan Land Transport Authority manage most major infrastructure domains in the city.