Reimagining Bengaluru as set of five km neighbourhoods
The best news in Bengaluru in 2020 were three specific projects announced by the Chief Minister under the Mission Bengaluru 2020. These were the desire to make NGEF a public space, Mysuru Lamp Factory as a tracker of Bengaluru’s old and contemporary history and drain re-modelling.
While one is sceptical of announcements, the mere fact that the government thought publicly about public spaces is a source of happiness in the pandemic era! Any imagination of the future city post-pandemic needs to also address the messy present. Currently, Bengaluru resembles a Mohenjo Daro, Harappa kind of archaeological excavation site. The first thing we need to focus on is to complete many of these year-long projects that are in various stages of chaos – think Smart City, Koramangala overpass, etc.
Work from Home has become the norm in Silicon City. If there is a larger takeaway from the pandemic it is that live and work nearby must become the norm. The ancient public sector townships like ITI, BEL, HAL had cracked the code with the factories, housing, educational institutions and parks all in the neighbourhood. We need to rediscover that form.
In one’s imagination, we could rethink Bengaluru as a set of multiple 5 km ‘cities’. Within each 5 km ‘ring’, it should be possible for its residents to stay, work and live a life that addresses 95 per cent of the educational, health and social needs of its residents. It is possible to make this happen for middle- and higher-income groups.
The challenge will be to think differently about those we take for granted – the maids, drivers, vegetable vendors, retail outlet workers, etc. The way out is an innovative, social rental housing approach for these groups and distributed public health and education centres. Currently, there is almost no significant initiative to make social renting housing available on scale.
The benefits of the 5 km ‘city’ is that it would be feasible to cover them with a lower carbon footprint (walking, cycling) and manage life and work even if we are hit by future events that require self-reliant local neighbourhood. The pedestrian and public space for all will become centre stage in such an imagination. Once in a way we can choose to step out of these self-contained spaces to partake of others’ archaeological marvels!
V Ravichandar Urbanist and civic evangelist