The paradox of public spaces in Bengaluru

Looking at social media and ‘national’ television, you would imagine Bengaluru is a hell hole. If it is, it must be an attractive one, drawing millions from all over India to settle here.

Everyone has a say on how awful the traffic is in Bengaluru, and how the jams at Silk Board are the worst in the world. For at least a couple of decades, folks writing memes and jokes have had a field day at Bengaluru’s expense. And then they put politicians in the dock and assume it is all because of poor planning and lack of foresight.

The truth is, even where the planning is perfect, we work towards making our reality far from perfect. That is perhaps because we as a people have developed a stubborn distaste for anything that makes our shared spaces easy to access and use. Don’t know if this is because we are taught the virtues of austerity and perseverance, but the middle class and those aspiring to its intellectual confidence disdain anything that even remotely looks like luxury in public spaces. It is a different matter when it comes to private spaces, especially those belonging to the more affluent. Villas and gated communities boast the fanciest amenities, even if the roads leading up to them are sites of daily road rage.

Every time I take an old photograph to the frame makers in southern Bengaluru, which is where I live, I insist they mount the picture on a larger board before they frame it. Pictures look better, and gain in perspective, when we allow white space around them. Invariably, the frame makers pay no heed, and fix the frame tightly around the picture with no breathing space. This can leave you frustrated, but I now have a theory about why this happens--the frame makers are convinced white space is just wasteful indulgence. And even if they charge you for a bigger board, they think it is their duty to stop you from wasting our nation’s precious resources.

This is perhaps the principle driving house owners, even those of palatial ones, to grow their gardens on the footpaths in front of them. They then fence off the public property. High-ranking people routinely practise this ‘austerity’, using their rightful spaces to build as they please, and then grabbing some common ground that they believe will be ‘misused’ by the public.

Which brings us to how our public spaces shrink. When you drive around the many neighbourhoods around Silk Board, you proceed at a snail’s pace or get stuck on the narrow roads and bylanes. Begur and Bommanahalli are not too far from the infamous Silk Board. Bannerghatta Road, which runs parallel to Hosur Road, is choc-a-bloc too. Before you blame it on poor planning, take a close look on either side, and you realise how it was a much wider road on the drawing board. An endless line of buildings stretch all the way to the edge of the road, covering the service roads that ought to have run along the bustling thoroughfare. These buildings house reputed businesses and posh apartments, and they flaunt their names proudly. I can’t recall anyone protesting, or demanding restoration of the public land whose market price would be astronomical. Citizens are preoccupied with social media battles or convinced that service roads and footpaths are a waste of precious space. The urge is to put it to more productive use, and follow in the footsteps of the owners, many of whom you can be sure are important functionaries of our political parties.

And if you want to insure against demolitions, you build a shrine or two along the way. A rare administration may demolish illegal buildings on a stormwater drain, but it would take a foolhardy government to pull down religious structures even if they are blocking our roads and causing traffic nightmares.

Our planners and administrators from an earlier era imagined wide spaces for everyone. They drew parks, gardens, playgrounds and wide open spaces into their layout blueprints. They sometimes took inspiration from grand colonial styles and our magnificent temple architecture to plan our public spaces. But we live in an era when we like our spaces ‘optimised’, and think jostling is noble. We summon up all our nationalistic pride and denounce bus services and power supply if they don’t burn a small hole in our pockets. It somehow eludes us that we have paid for these services in the form of taxes, and they aren’t freebies. As our civic amenities sites go into private hands, and we pay a ransom for every public service we use, we argue with the jaunty swagger of free market economists.