Nowhere to play

Nowhere to play

The notion of public space has changed as the number of places where youth can spend time without spending money goods or services have drastically dropped, discovers RAKESH MEHAR

Photo: S. Siva Saravanan

On the bench Concrete is eating into community spaces

For 17-year-old Sanjeev M., a great fan of cricket and football, the problem is having to travel six km to the nearest field and then having to tussle with four or five other groups of people who want to use the same space. For 37-year-old Malathi S. , it is where to take her young daughter every Sunday so that she can be entertained for the whole day without putting a dent in the family budget. For 23-year-old Aswathi, who lives in Indiranagar, the issue is with finding a place to swim without having to spend a bomb on club memberships or travelling halfway across the city.

And for many of her friends it is finding a place to hang out without having to buy food, drink or what have you. On the face of it, the issue for all these people and many more like them seems simply one of shrinking recreational space. Even as the city grows outward, lung spaces that were traditionally used by the public for various social purposes gets filled up by malls. However, as many sociologists and researchers point out, there is more to the way Bangalore has grown and changed than is visible on the surface. Not only have public spaces given way to private spaces, but the very notion of public space has itself changed. As any teenager or young adult will point out, the number of places where the youth can simply spend time without consuming some goods or services have drastically dropped. Thus, for most people in the city, malls, multiplexes, cafes and shopping centres have become the new public spaces, says Ramesh Bairy, a sociologist with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkatta and a Bangalorean who finds it harder to recognize the city each time he returns. These places are exclusive rather than inclusive. “There is a huge cultural economy of signs and expressions, which say where you can go and where you cannot. In that sense, these spaces are no longer public but are very defined and restricted.”

Moreover, these new “public” spaces are also markedly different from old market spaces in that they lack an identity of their own, says photographer Clare Arni, who helped document the city’s growth through her photographs in the book “The Promise of a Metropolis” by Janaki Nair. “While the bazaar streets like Commercial Street and Brigade Road used to have a very individualistic identity, nowadays there are endless lines of the same shops.” The result, she explains, is that Bangalore’s market spaces have increasingly turned more soulless.

Even where traditional public spaces like parks, lakes and so on exist, the way that they are being “developed”, “redesigned” and maintained suggests that they are seen as catering only to particular classes of people. For instance, most parks in the city have been undergoing face lifts, with landscaped areas, jogging tracks and lawns increasingly becoming the only accepted idea of beautiful. And once the parks have been “beautified”, they are locked up for most hours of the day and admittance fees are charged so that they can be maintained in this condition.

One of the prime causes for this re-imagination of public spaces, explains Lalitha Kamath of the Collaborative for the Advancement of Studies in Urbanism through Mixed-Media (CASUMM), is the growth of the middle class in terms of disposable incomes as well as travel to other countries around the world. This middle class, she says, becomes an importer of ideas, as people imbibe those lifestyles and associate them with progress. “Typically they would say: ‘I saw this in London or in New York. Why shouldn’t our city have something like this?’ It’s all about trying to make Bangalore into a ‘world-class city’.”

Interestingly, she points out, many of the cities that we have borrowed our more recent ideas of public space from have themselves begun a turnaround.

“In the US, the big debate is on how to recreate street life, the bustle, the variety, the unique sense of space. It is funny that here we’re trying to eradicate that sense of space.”

What this means for the city’s youth, says Dr. Nandini Mundkur of the Centre for Child Development and Disabilities, is that they rarely find a space where they can interact among themselves without a thrust on consumption. “An environment based on consumption does not provide the youth with a sense of judgement. What the youth need is a space where they can be themselves, meet and interact among themselves and receive healthy intellectual, emotional and physical stimulation.”

While dedicated youth spaces and well equipped community centres might still seem faraway dreams, it is perhaps prudent to at least retain what little public space the city holds, so that its future children might know what it is like to simply get out into the open.