Opinion Janaki Nair writes: D K Shivakumar, Bengaluru’s ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the wrong approach to cities

Despite the city’s image as a powerful economic motor, it is clear that the bourgeoisie finds it difficult to “manage” the city, and all suggested resolutions are to avoid the tedious challenges of everyday life. Hence, new plans for a subterranean way of smoothening the path of the private automobile. Why are ordinary citizens filled with a sense of foreboding at the thought of these proposed tunnels? Because, apart from the untold misery they will inflict on all for years to come — since all public utilities first arrive as “natural disasters” — such schemes are doomed to fail. Did the withdrawal of the middle class into “gated enclaves” to escape the sheer unpredictability of everyday life in the city save them from the swirling flood waters last year?

The challenge to the city’s governance comes from yet another, usually subaltern, quarter. It is the pushback of democracy, the noisy occupation of streets, either temporarily or permanently, with shamianas, flag poles, banners, statues and shrines which defy the law, and cock a snook at planning mechanisms. The state, not to be outdone, takes part in these contests over public space in the city, by both condoning violations and participating in them. The commercial clutter of monstrous advertisements and visually taxing “promotions”, usually of politicians, the building of gigantic statues and temples, including in the middle of water bodies and roads, simultaneously disrupt planning law and order and assert an “alternative” to it.

Can Bengaluru’s development become a moment for seriously rethinking how our cities work? To become thus cosmopolitical, not cosmopolitan?

Let’s treat the city as a public good, not a private asset. That means thinking from the bottom up to build anew the idea of the commons — a water commons, a greens commons, a material commons, a housing commons, a land commons to name just a few.

For instance, the city is naturally endowed with large spaces and water bodies that need to be protected to prevent the deluge. But consider this. While gigantic statues are built to Kempegowda, a simple principle of city building has been willfully ignored. That is the relationship between water bodies, open spaces, and built structure. Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, and then the British, gave us two large and enjoyable public parks, Lalbagh and Cubbon Park. Has our post-independence political and industrial leadership given us a single comparable facility? Let the Bangalore Palace (Acquisition and Transfer) Act, 1996 be made law to make way for a people’s palace ground. Let Turahalli, Jarakabande Kaval, and other forests around Bangalore be cautiously and imaginatively (re)opened for public visits. Let the expansive spaces of the now-defunct public sector be opened up for public enjoyment and instruction. (I hesitate to use the word “development” which usually brings cement-concrete and questionable statuary in its trail).

The much-maligned NGOs and ecology experts have exhaustively documented the urgency of saving the water bodies, and open spaces, and limiting the rights of real estate, but what chance of such “experts” being heard when the majority of those in political power currently represent that very interest? When the decision of a previous government to stand down from an ill-conceived steel flyover is seen as a failure?

Can the majority be benefitted from a robust public transport system, with smaller and more efficient public service vehicles (Curitiba, Brazil), severe (tax and other) curbs on the use of private transport (yes, as in Singapore), making active travel the priority (cycling as in Bogota, or simply stress-free walking), and simultaneously, curb drastically private automobile use (as in Delhi during odd-even experiments)?

Can the state initiate cooperative housing, not as avenues for land grab, or the sinks of accumulation that they once became, but as an alternative way of provisioning the urban poor with housing? Can the builders be held accountable to the promises made to the urban poor?
It is not, we well know, for want of imagination, expertise or knowledge that the city suffers from flash floods in even gated enclaves. Not for want of better systems that the city’s ubiquitous garbage is simply redistributed rather than disposed of sustainably. Not for want of intelligent and humane suggestions that we cannot solve the enormous public health problem (and cost) presented by stray dogs.

For all its boasts of being a high-tech city, why is Bengaluru plagued by areas of (knowledge) darkness, as was experienced in my (otherwise acknowledged as elite) area, when a poisonous commingling of sewage and water could not be detected for two weeks? Because dangerous levels of subcontracting have rendered such knowledge opaque.

So more planning, or less of it? Or planning of a completely different kind? Planning law is recklessly subverted, by citizens, builders, and the state itself, which “regularises” illegalities as a way of providing housing for the urban poor. This has been demonstrated by almost all scholarly works on the city. Why has such expertise been systematically sidelined, while loud suggestions are made to “bulldoze” public opinion (Deputy CM D K Shivakumar), double road space for private vehicles (industry leaders), and to freshly acquire agricultural land for “new” public parks (former minister Ashwathnarayana)?

A perusal of newspapers over the last 50 years is sobering, giving us vital clues to the repeated warnings — and suggestions — that have been studiously ignored, since both state and industry benefit from undermining urban law. Can ordinary citizens still dream of a cosmopolitical future, set down rules for disciplining capital’s rapacious (and illegal) appetites, and insist on a new intergenerational responsibility, before the city sinks beneath the weight of its own “development”?

The writer is a Bengaluru-based historian