WALK THE PIPELINE: Urban Infrastructure Landscapes in Bengaluru's Long Twentieth Century

Vanesa Castán Broto,Hita Unnikrishnan,H.S Sudhira

doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12985

Abstract

AbstractWalking reveals how urban infrastructure lends identity to the urban landscape. This article focuses on the oldest water pipeline in the city of Bengaluru, India. A series of vignettes trace the linear trajectory of the walk both in terms of the spatial orientation of the pipeline, and its trajectory through time. Through space, the pipeline connects the centre of the city with its suburbs, tracking differential and sometimes invisible patterns of urbanization that follow the city's sprawl. Through time, the pipeline connects water narratives, from nostalgic notions of precolonial management to the contemporary construction of scarcity. The use of walking as a methodological tool draws attention to the subsumed and often invisible experiences of inequity in various parts of the city. The pipeline is a maker of urban stories alongside routine practices and larger strategic projects of urban development. While the pipeline enables the provision of water, the neighbourhoods it passes through are sometimes excluded from the service it provides. Strategic projects have attempted to control water resources following different ways of imagining the city. Still, such urban imaginations coexist with a more extensive set of everyday practices that engage with the pipeline in the urban landscape.

Highlights

Rebecca Solnit describes walking as an amateurish activity that delivers amateur histories (Solnit, 2001)
The narrative exposes urban water myths embedded in the infrastructure landscape. It reveals the pipeline both as a maker of urban stories and as an enabler of marginalization, both processes operating alongside routine practices and larger strategic projects of urban transformation
We focus on developing a walking account of the oldest water pipeline in Bengaluru, India, and its insertion in processes of urban transformation over the long twentieth century

Summary

Introduction

Rebecca Solnit describes walking as an amateurish activity that delivers amateur histories (Solnit, 2001). Gandy (2014) has described water infrastructures and their cultural representations as manifestations of modernity projects that over the long twentieth century have shaped both the imagined city and the vast expanse of ecological relations and transformations that constitute urban infrastructure landscapes. Walking it is a means to examine the relationship between the pipeline’s visible material aspects today and their configuration within a particular urban history. The narrative exposes urban water myths embedded in the infrastructure landscape It reveals the pipeline both as a maker of urban stories and as an enabler of marginalization, both processes operating alongside routine practices and larger strategic projects of urban transformation. Urban infrastructure landscapes result from multiple, incoherent and not necessarily purposeful actions of human and non-human actors rather than from the materialization of single-purpose strategic projects. Water scarcity debates involve a very active group of water experts and ecological activists, who are concerned about the dependence of at least 30% of the city’s water supply on exploiting underground resources

Netkal Balancing Reservoir

Findings

BMA BMRDA