The 21st century is one of unprecedented change. By 2050, fast growing cities from Asia, Africa, and Latin America will contain the majority of urban residents. Ensuring that these growing cities have sufficient space for nature is essential if we want to have clean air, water and food in our cities. Yet, despite the mounting evidence, policymakers and planners worldwide fail to understand the importance of building cities around nature. Instead, city after city pursues an aggressive path of growth that crowds out nature.
Transformations
There is much to learn from the changes we observe in Bengaluru. Even in places that urban nature has seemingly endured, we find fundamental transformations. A city that once used a wide palette of species has drastically simplified and reduced the diversity of vegetation. This mirrors a parallel simplification of human interactions with biodiversity. Once, nature enjoyed a pre-eminent cultural, social and economic role in the daily life of Bengaluru’s residents. Trees, plants and fish were consumed as food, used as medicine. Wetlands, lakes, and trees were worshipped, and used for recreation and play. With a move to introduce ornamental exotic non-flowering and non-fruiting (non-“messy”) species, many of Bengaluru’s green spaces are now landscaped with grassy lawns and ornamental shrubbery, maintained by intense application of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides.
In a city where millions are starving, the systematic replacement of traditional roadside trees such as mango, jamun and jackfruit with “non-messy” ornamental species defies both traditional wisdom and modern common sense.
The use of nature is also constrained. Signs in parks and lakes forbid plucking plants for herbal medicines, food, or flowers for worship — yet these uses were common in Bengaluru until the 1990s. As a consequence, multi-functional community parks are transformed into places of recreation and exercise: activities that could also be conducted in a gym or mall. It is the beginning of a slippery slope that makes a park interchangeable with other public utilities such as metro stations or government offices.
The story of Bengaluru is thus the story of the wholesale re-naturing of urban nature. Once shaped in diverse ways by the hands of many, ecology is now forced into standard moulds by a like-minded few, a reflection of the inequities that impact all cities today. Nature, once considered an ‘Akshayapatra’ or cornucopia, is now a three dimensional work of art, to be appreciatively viewed but not directly used.
Multi-functional nature
Our studies show that grazers and fishers in peri-urban lakes, home gardeners, and slum residents are the last refuges for multi-functional nature, where native species predominate, diverse cultural and foraging uses persist, accommodating people and biodiversity. These communities constitute some of the staunchest protectors of lakes and wetlands, because they are essential for their survival and for a core cultural way of life that few modern urban residents now relate to.
There is much that we can, and must learn from these communities to understand how to maintain and create new nature commons. Yet, urban planning discussions systematically exclude these important voices from debate. Will we learn from our ecological history?
(Harini Nagendra is a professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, and author of ‘Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future’.)
