2020/02/03 by Hita Unnikrishnan, B. Manjunatha, Harini Nagendra +1 · 15 citations
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Agriculture #Archaeology #Business #Colonialism #Corporate governance #Environmental planning #Geography #Livelihood #Narrative #Political science #Technocracy #Urban Planning and Governance #Water Governance and Infrastructure #Water resources management and optimization
paper · doi:10.1080/02723638.2019.1709756
published in Urban Geography 42(3), 263-288 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 2020/02/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/29
This paper uses the example of a lost urban lake – the Dharmambudhi within the south Indian city of Bengaluru to illustrate the profound and long-standing effects of historical socio-technical infrastructural change. We demonstrate processes by which capitalist urban development and notions of the sanitary city in the nineteenth century led to the collapse of the lake system and its conversion into a bus station. We also show how by removing the use of the water body, it became possible to destroy a critical urban ecological infrastructure, thus making it unusable to people who depended upon it to sustain their lives and livelihoods. This coupled with technocratic narratives of efficiency and scarcity led to the co-opting of the resource rendering them separate from urban life.