Ecologically smart cities

Several kilometres of walking paths and jogging tracks, parking spots at the Queen’s statue, band stand and Central Library, children’s play equipment with swings and a sand pit, benches, dustbins and cycle stands, a water fountain, a “sound garden”. Sounds like an infrastructure project? Nope. It’s the controversial Cubbon Park Smart City work plan for phases 1 and 2, of which phase 1 commenced recently.

Parks are the most visible green spaces for nature-starved city dwellers. Bengaluru’s residents and visitors, old and new, seek out Cubbon Park and Lal Bagh in the thousands on the weekends, seeking a chance to rejuvenate their minds and spirits amidst birdsong, flowers and the rustling of leaves, catching up with friends, walking their dogs, taking a family picnic or just enjoying the chance to be alone in the middle of a crowd.

For so many of us, the city’s parks represent one of the few opportunities for real relaxation, sans devices – an opportunity that is available for everyone, even those who cannot afford to pay for their entertainment. We know that parks have many important psychological and physiological benefits. Children who live close to a park have a reduced risk of childhood obesity, and adults are less likely to have blood pressure or diabetes. The benefits of regular visits to a park include relief from mental stress from being cooped into small, cramped places at work and home – which we all can attest to needing in pandemic times.

Cubbon Park has been intensively planted and maintained by talented and creative horticulturalists over the decades, with a carefully planned mix of species that maintain biodiversity and are attractive to visitors. Yet today, we seem to have lost this knowledge. Our once-intuitive understanding of how to maintain these unique heritage green spaces as ecological locations has given way to a mechanical, engineering-based approach that seeks to bring in vast quantities of concrete and cement, and convert the park into a large built space dotted with greenery. Thereby destroying the ‘wild’ magic of the park that gives it its unique flavour.

Cubbon Park was built on land adjacent to the massive Sampangi lake (which now houses the Kanteerava sports stadium). It contains a number of heritage spaces of which many visitors are unaware – including the uppu neerina kunte (salt-water pond) which is integral to the iconic Karaga festival procession, and a number of massive kattes with peepal trees and small shrines, under which people bring grain and meat to feed the birds and wildlife, a practice that has continued for decades, if not centuries. Civic groups have fiercely protected the park, and the rights of people to access it without entry fees, forcing the Horticulture Department to reverse a plan to charge fees in 2009. Even earlier, in 1998, a protest by Sanmathi – an organisation of Mothers and Others – in collaboration with organisations like the Environment Support Group, saved large sections of Cubbon Park from being converted into housing for legislators.

But community initiatives and citizen action cannot do everything. The number of species in Lal Bagh and Cubbon Park has shrunk from what it was 150 years back. The smart city project has plans to improve the biodiversity of the park. It should concentrate on restoring the ecological processes that sustain the park, and not transform into a civil engineering project. Of course, some of the infrastructure needs to be repaired. Making the park handicap-accessible is critical, for instance, as is the need to change some of the playground equipment, which is rusty and damaged in many areas. But such fixes should be as minimally intrusive as possible. As it is, the original 300-acre space has shrunk by over a third, losing ground to roads, cement and built infrastructure. We cannot afford to lose even a square metre of one of the few last remaining heritage spaces in the city to more concrete. That would not be smart, but ecologically foolish.

(The author is a Azim Premji University Prof, who prides herself on barking up all trees, right and wrong)