At the end of each year, it is common to ask ourselves what we wish for in the New Year. And that is not only for our personal lives, it includes asking what we wish for the places we inhabit. In Namma Bengaluru, there is a lot to wish for, because there is so much we have not done yet.
It will be an interesting year because we will have two major elections in this period -- to the state Assembly which decides so much of what happens in the city, and to the much-maligned BBMP, which seems forever on a treadmill of promising big changes but rarely delivering any of it.
The first thing to wish for, then, is that the public institutions that shape our lives should do their jobs much better. They should deliver public services far more effectively, build much better infrastructure, and strive to improve the ease of living for people at all income levels.
One can write these down as targets. BMTC should add 5,000 buses at least this year. BBMP should build 100+ walkable footpaths on major streets. Bescom should ensure renewable power supply to at least 1/10th of the buildings in the city. Ten more lakes should be revived and then managed by local communities. And so on.
A list like that, however, won’t capture the essence of the change we want. In the life of a city, items on a wish list can be checked off as and when we get them, but the list itself is perennial, with new things appearing on it constantly. It represents an endless imagination of what the people of Namma Bengaluru want it to be.
What we really want, therefore, is a good way of adding new things to that list, again and again. How can we create a collective aspiration of what we want the city to be, and then achieve it?
With or without answers to this question, the city changes. It is more than 10 years since BDA built the last planned layout, but thirty lakh people have moved to Bengaluru in the meantime. Large employers are reshaping neighbourhoods simply by locating jobs in them. And these relentless trends have recently been compounded by waves of Covid, which have dramatically changed how people work in the city and how they now view the balance between life and work.
These changes appear to homogenise our lives in some ways, but they have also brought about much diversity and inequality. Our government institutions struggle with this because they know only to operate with one rule for all situations, as though all people lead similar lives for the same goals.
As a result, we are merely going from one year to the next, watching new buildings come up randomly in places that are far from the original city. The people in those places are voting with their feet, leaving their hometowns and villages to be ‘in Bengaluru’, despite the sprawl and chaos. And yet they do not join it fully, finding homes and work in the city’s periphery, which is the only place they can afford one and find the other.
We need to shake this tree really hard. It contains much good fruit, which is why our city is growing faster than almost any other place on the planet. But too often we find ourselves on the ground, looking up at it and thinking, “if only we could taste them”.
We have gone year after year asking ourselves what new things we wish for the city. It is time to ask what we should think about it.
(The writer is an urbanist, climate scientist and social entrepreneur who has founded a number of initiatives in media, technology and mobility. He is currently working on a new venture for accelerated adoption of sustainable products and services in neighbourhoods.)