MONSOON COMMONS in BENGALURU

Monsoons have historically supported the life of urban/rural ecologies and economies, contributing to the deep resonance of a “monsoon feeling” in Indian culture, as attested by innumerable expressions in the arts over centuries, and several films. The relationship between rain and life is a worldwide phenomenon, yet the monsoon in India has raised radical scenarios about life or death. The question about who owns water directly feeds into the notion of the commons – as the convergence of shared resources, heterogeneous components of community, and the action of establishing a process of active engagement.

Because of Bengaluru’s topography of ridges and valleys (Figure 1), a system of cascading human-made lakes and their interconnections offered access to, and permanent availability of water for human and non-human uses. The Workshop’s goal is to witness and frame the entanglements among heterogeneous actors, in the context of the rapid urban expansion in its peri urban areas that face a real crisis with water.

On the one hand, the co-presence of real estate logics of hyper-development and a modernist notion of infrastructure are not capable of engaging water as a common resource, resulting in repeated disastrous floods and droughts. On the other, community attempts to reactivate the use of wells in villages, through a connection with the aquifer as a complement to the surface world of agricultural practices, reasserts the connection between spirituality and water collection manifested by the integration of temples and water tanks (Figure 2).

We will visit and map areas in which these questions are most apparent, to explore whether there may be the possibility of commoning after the demise of the historical wisdom about the profound relationship between sky and earth.