Even as the government of Karnataka has unveiled full-page advertisements celebrating Bengaluru’s designation at the Davos World Economic Forum as the World’s Most Dynamic City, the residents of the city recognise it as a barely functional metropolis staring at an impending water crisis of a scale and intensity not seen before.
Bengaluru’s urban predicament is most often understood to be the result of the decadal explosion of its population (6.5 million in 2001 to 9.6 million in 2011) and unhindered spatial expansion of urbanised area (from 226 sq. km in 1995 to about 710 sq. km in 2007). Can such explosive growth be sustained without a sound planning process?
In this five-part series, we confront manifold crises that planning in Bengaluru faces. Who should plan? At what scale should planning take place? What is the appropriate process to be followed and what outcomes can we expect from the planning process? Finally, can we develop an implementable and enforceable plan?
If the growing frustration and protests on the streets of Bengaluru led by citizens of various social, demographic and economic backgrounds with diverse political dispositions are to be responded to meaningfully, Bengaluru needs to revisit its planning process. The first place to start is to review and evaluate the ideas behind the formulation and implementation of the preceding Revised Master Plan 2015 (RMP 2015) for Bengaluru.
The RMP 2015 promoted a compact city model, with allocation of higher floor-area ratios in the core areas, tapering down at the peripheries. Secondary centres, with higher development rights, were located at intersections of public transit alignments. To what extent did the compact city model succeed?
Over the last decade, the highly speculative nature of the city’s land markets has superseded the RMP 2015’s idealistic diagrams for a compact city. New forms of capital emerging from securitization and financialization of the world economy have driven and shaped the city’s real estate markets, large and small resulting in twin pressures: making the price of land and real estate largely unaffordable in the urban core and unprecedented urban sprawl and fragmented development on the urban peripheries of Bengaluru.
The draft RMP 2015 also planned for development of secondary centres in proximity to public transit stations. These included among others the sites of and adjoining Binny and Minerva mills, the now Mantri and Orion malls. These secondary centres were to be developed through pooling of land for large-scale public infrastructure within the core areas of the city.
Instead, many of these sites have now developed purely as private secondary centres, as planning and enforcing authorities’ amended regulatory mandates that supported public provisioning in the final RMP 2015.
The RMP 2015 was also not a static one-size-fits-all plan: it acknowledged the city’s diverse and dynamic urban geographies. In response to the city’s dynamism, the plan claimed to dismantle the rigid regulations of the preceding Comprehensive Development Plan 1995 and introduced ‘mixed land use zones’.
While localities such as Cubbon Pete, which previously engaged in traditional textile weaving, seem to have benefited from introduction of ‘mixed land use zoning’, inhabitants of newly planned residential layouts such as Koramangala and Indiranagar have fiercely protested against this categorisation. Commercial proliferation, in rampant violation of permissible mixed land uses, has aggravated sentiments against mixed land use.
While it is tempting to say that the RMP 2015 has failed, it is unclear how we understand these failures. We argue that at the root of this failure is an opaque supply driven approach to planning. The result is a master plan crafted by an undemocratic authority by masking political agendas to deliver a prescriptive unit and parcel level zoning and development permission for 10-year planning periods.
A diverse dynamic metropolis with an increasingly aware and politically active citizenry needs a demand-driven planning approach at a multi-scalar level that unravels and makes transparent political, ecological and economic trade-offs at the root of the planning process.
Next week, we show why conferring planning power on a legitimate authority is the first step in devising a new approach to planning for Bengaluru.
(Sudhir Krishnaswamy is professor of law and director of School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University, and founder-trustee of the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru; Champaka Rajagopal is visiting professor, Azim Premji University; and Mathew Idiculla is research associate, Centre for Law and Policy Research)
