Imagining Bengaluru

Bengaluru suffers from major gaps in urban planning, evidenced every day in traffic jams, poor roads, flooding in every storm, lack of housing for the poor, and many other such symptoms. Civil society responds through the usual litany of failures: lack of political will, poor implementation, domination by vested interests, low degrees of decentralisation and authority granted to municipal governance, fragmentation into isolated bureaucracies, and so on. This would suggest we could overcome these failures by a political will that extends the reach of master planning to make it professionalised, inclusive, transparent, decentralised, and coordinated.

The master plans we have seen so far for Bengaluru have been highly technical documents without clarity on the foundation of an idealistic vision.

How should we imagine Bengaluru as a city? What is the inherent nature of cities that makes them dynamic and creative spaces, and how should we incorporate this in Bengaluru? Can the singular vision of a master plan capture what we want Bengaluru to be? How can a plan for Bengaluru inclusively recognise its diversity? Should we envisage Bengaluru as a unitary or a complex entity?

The panel will debate these questions and more, seeking to articulate the framework of a vision that should underpin the planning of Bengaluru.