By Govind Gopakumar, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Govind Gopakumar is Associate Professor at the Centre for Engineering in Society at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. His research is quite interdisciplinary and has focussed on the politics of urban infrastructure, predominantly in Indian cities. He has increasingly become very interested in the “auto-mobility turn”. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on the installation of automobility in the Indian city of Bangalore. Prior to this he scripted and directed a film – Social Life of a Bus (https://youtu.be/hYxwSWfL3bI) – that examines the pulls and shoves of public transport in the context of rising automobility. More details about Govind’s research can be seen at http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~govind/​

Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore) is a large metropolitan city in south-central India that is home to about 10 million people and their 6 million (largely) private vehicles. Of late, the city has generated a lot of attention internationally on account of its rapid ‘rise’ as the hub of India’s high technology industry and its prominence as a fast globalizing city. In the popular media, the ‘rise’ of Bengaluru has been a trigger for numerous investigations into the dynamics of Bengaluru’s infrastructures, especially its road infrastructures. In many of these accounts, the performance of the city’s infrastructures leaves much to be desired if the city is to take its global ambitions seriously. Recent social scientific investigations into the global tropes associated with recent infrastructure developments have shown a picture of stark unevenness with infrastructures targeting the aspirations of particular sections of society while neglecting others. In this context, it is surprising that congestion in the city is one largely unexamined phenomenon. This is particularly surprising because talk of congestion in the contemporary city of Bengaluru (given the explosive growth in private vehicles and the potential establishment of what John Urry has called a system of automobility), arguably more than any other city in India, is omnipresent in public discourse and popular culture. A critical investigation into congestion in the city is particularly relevant now given the overwhelming aspiration in the North and the South to construct the urban place as a ‘space of flows’ where frictions and blocks are minimized, where congestion is not just inconvenient it is deeply threatening to the constitution of what Baumann calls ‘liquid modernity’.

Against this backdrop, the ‘congested Bengaluru’ narrative often reads congestion in monolithic and instrumental terms as an epiphenomenon related to the exponential rise in vehicular population, itself an index of Bengaluru’s remarkable success in the era of globalized capitalist production. But a closer examination of the narrative reveals several complexities that defy a linear characterization of congestion solely as a manifestation of vehicular growth. Congestion in Bengaluru, as reported in newspapers is associated with sporadic events not necessarily associated solely with vehicular growth. Instances of traffic congestion occur during instances of flooding caused by the inability of local hydrological channels to function due to the alteration or erasure of several local water bodies and drainage channels from the urban fabric of the city. Congestion is also associated with the city’s unique topographical history that has resulted in the concentration of several government offices in the heart of the city close to densely populated habitation and commercial centres. How can one explain this contradiction? Heeding the transport historian Colin Divall’s call to create a ‘usable past’, this paper calls for a historicization of the manifestation of congestion in Bengaluru in order to begin grasping the complexities of the experience of congestion in contemporary Bengaluru.

In my paper presented at T2M in Mexico city, I present a periodization of congestion and urban change over a two-hundred year span in Bengaluru from the early nineteenth century to current time. From my conference paper I reproduce below a key table depicting the historical periodization of congestion in the city:

In the paper I briefly describe each of these phases of congestion, dividing into four temporal segments that highlight critical shifts in urban society. I argue that the phenomenon of congestion in Bengaluru has evolved considerably over the years. Within each period, residents of Bengaluru defined congestion in a particular fashion and then subsequently sought to intervene within urban space to decongest the city. For example, in the initial colonial encounter, the British diagnosis of native disorder in urban management revolved due in part to what they perceived as particularistic modes that centred around different caste and occupational groups managing specific urban spaces in the city. In response, the British colonial government proposed impersonal arrangements of British municipalization materialized in specific municipal offices. In yet another instance, during the planned city phase, the diagnosis of congestion circled around unplanned urban growth. In response, master planning composed of decongestive instruments such as a green belt, industrial dispersion and planning criteria was thought to be the solution. However, master planning has also been the spur for widespread flouting and illegality by affluent sections and by the state itself. For example, on the basis of public purpose several water bodies were filled and converted into bus termini, stadiums and housing layouts, contributing in no small measure to the city’s contemporary hydrological problems. These historical decongestive efforts have left behind important residues that color and influence the current experience of congestion in Bengaluru.

Through such a ‘usable’ historical analysis of congestion, I would like to make a notable point. Histories of automobility thus far have predominantly been located in Western societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While these settings offer different social and political contexts from Bengaluru’s, they provide some important pointers. Historians in these settings have pointed out how fields of traffic engineering and urban planning as instrumental approaches to planning for growing city traffic arose out of particular social and political circumstances in these settings. Since then these fields have been universalized and adopted as solution strategies in contexts around the world. Thus, traffic congestion and responses in the context of a universal automobility have been dominated by instrumental approaches of modern traffic engineering or economistic incentive-driven approaches. These approaches seek to either create supply infrastructure for reducing congestion, or reducing cars on the road by limiting demand for cars. This paper questions the prevalence of linear readings and interventions into congestion. I argue that if congestion and the putative automobilization of Bengaluru require a solution, the answer does not lie within instrumental approaches but a socially situated approach that seeks to shape urban form and shape resident behavior in ways that are progressive and sustainable.