Park Politics in a Postcolonial Indian City: Planning (and) Public Space in Bangalore

Abstract

This paper highlights different facets of public space in Indian cities by examining contestations and conceptualizations of a maidan (open ground) in Bangalore. Since the early 1980s, the Post Office Ground, a master planned open space in an upperclass neighbourhood of Bangalore, was used as a place for exercise and recreation by local residents and visitors. Local residents contested and stopped government a empts to build quasi-public buildings on the maidan. The protracted battles for the Ground, resulting in its partial conversion to a gated park, reveal Bangalore's complex state–society–space dynamics where contestations and negotiations between actors of state and society compete with the master plan in shaping public space. This article concludes that the open maidan presents a more inclusive, though contentious, terrain for such contestations and negotiations than the gated park.