Who will Decongest Bengaluru? Politics, Infrastructures & Scapes

The main objective of this paper is to investigate deliberate instances of the unclogging of congested urban infrastructures through such measures as widening roads and constructing underpasses. Such decongestive actions have increasingly become routine in the burgeoning cities of the Global South. The city of Bengaluru, India’s hub for business process outsourcing and for new information technology innovation and entrepreneurship, provides an apt location to examine and excavate the political connotations of decongestive work. In doing so, this paper proposes infrastructure scape as an explanatory concept to describe three facets of decongestive efforts in Bengaluru – first, the organizing principle that assembles them, second, the technological sensibility that constitute these efforts, and finally the value commitments that each scape proposes.