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

Abstract

Walking 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.'Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and crosscontinental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us back to the sites of this history. ' Solnit (2001: 4)

Exploring energy citizenship in the urban heating system with the ‘Walking with Energy’ methodology

“…Earlier research on energy citizenship tends to overlook the importance of local community participation in debating and reflecting on existing and future energy policies. Inclusive processes, where the relationship between heat production and its use are visualised, such as walking and talking about district heating pipes and how heat is produced, can be an effective means to pursue energy democracy and energy literacy [ 42 , 44 ].…”

The geographies of colonial infrastructures: Mobility, im/materiality, and politics on walking trails in the Middle East

“…One of the ways this paper develops scholarship on mobility, im/materiality, and colonialism is to explore the relationship between infrastructure and mobility politics, including walking mobilities. Walking as method has recently been used to understand embodied accounts of infrastructure, including the inequalities of infrastructural mobilities, their situated politics, and how infrastructures ‘support, hinder or enable certain directions and paces of pedestrian activity’ (Bhattacharya & Barry, 2021, p. 267; Castán Broto et al, 2021). Literature connecting walking and infrastructure addresses critiques that accounts of walking in geography lack discussion of the politics of walking (Mason, 2021).…”

Psychogeography: Walking through strategy, nature and narrative

“…In a brief comment on psychogeography, Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor (2013: 474) record ‘the work of scholars who engage with psychogeography to excavate the uncanny, indeterminate traces that persist in marginal spaces’. But whereas most of those margins are in selected metropolitan cities, others have rendered psychogeography into a mode of purposeful encounter in postsocialist and postcolonial cities in Africa, the Balkans and Asia (Bekteshi and Mino, 2019; Castán Broto et al, 2021; Paasche and Sidaway, 2010, 2015, 2021; Sarma and Sidaway, 2020; Sidaway et al, 2014a, 2014b; Véron, 2016). Psychogeography is invoked too in Ahmed Mater’s (2016) narrative of the makeover of Mecca in the last 15 years.…”