Potemkin streets

Bangalore is a tapestry of neighbourhoods, each with its own rhythm and pattern connected to each other through motorised transport. I do not exaggerate this phenomenon, try getting across Richmond Road at peak traffic hours. 

Streets are imagined to be stages for transport and movement, spaces for passing through rather than pauses. Their typical form would involve two or more lanes for automobiles, a pavement of similar form allowing two people (maybe more if the road is wide enough) to walk side by side and greenery to soften the harsh glare of asphalt. Parked cars are grudgingly allowed if it is deemed to be good for business of the street but static people on the streets are not usually appreciated. This little description was not always considered the norm in urban planning and hence may not be consistently seen across the world, but it is often considered the unstated law in planning streets in India today. 

Pavements are rarely wide enough to accommodate spontaneous functions. Every street must allow the thoroughfare of motorised traffic irrespective of the width of the street and often the pavement may be sacrificed for this mandate. Motorised before non motorised, and movement before interaction. 

Streets may be spotted with basic programme that is considered part of the transport repertoire like bus stops and taxi stands. The lack of rubbish bins along most pavements attests to this thought. The nostalgia of streets as spaces of interaction are privatised as Potemkin streets across the city. UB street is one such famous street on the first floor of UB city, fitted with an amphitheater, cafes and restaurants, street lamps and curated interaction. With the gradual gentrification of the neighbourhood, the streets around UB city were slowly transformed into spaces of transit and UB city took over the role of the street for itself. 

There is no place for the un-choreographed in the 'planned cities' of India and this is true for street food vendors - who are incessantly harassed, exploited and removed. They swarm in spaces with pedestrians, unregulated and self organised to create a medley of complementary tastes. They obstruct the path of the pedestrian with smells and sights and provide cheap culinary diversity to the city and hence they are often regarded as menace to the movement on streets and an eye sore to the Arcadian image of the ‘street’.  

Street food vendors provide cheap food to the city, balancing the cost of living in the city and creating self-employment for unskilled people. They perform a service to low income workers in both the formal and informal sectors, students in the city who have limited money and tourists who want to try the ‘authentic’ fare. In cities like Bombay and Calcutta street food is a part of the diet of the city irrespective of income making it a part of the culinary traditions of the city. In Bangalore, the lack of a critical mass of street food vendors across the city limits the innovation and diversity that could be achieved through this medium. 

The relevance of street food in a city is not romanticised fiction but rather an established fact outlined by the National Policy of Urban Street Vendors 2009 by the Government of India and in the Guidelines for the scheme of the upgradation of the quality of street food sponsored by the same government (both are easily available on the internet). Unfortunately policy documents are only frameworks that can be ignored by state ministries across the country. Many NGO’s internationally and nationally help to organise and fight for the right of street vendors, calling for regulating and legalising them to prevent exploitation from both policemen and the urban mafia.

The Hindu on 19th of July 2010 highlighted the “New set of hawking rules from August” of the same year, proving without doubt the attitude that the High court and the Government in Karnataka takes towards this form of business in the city. The laws stated in the article as the court ruling are counter intuitive to business for a hawker by restricting them from areas that are pedestrian friendly and restricting them to ‘hawking zones’. A hawker does not need a hawking zone - they gather at zones that are best for hawking, though the creation of additional zones may create new identity and activity in the city. 

The vision document for the Masterplan 2015 of Bangalore clearly states that zones for street vendors have been recognised in the conceptualisation of the master plan, but I was unable to find a detailed plan or strategy that highlights where these zones are (They may still be on the drawing board), the number of hawkers that they can accommodate or data that justified the creation of those particular zones. 

There should have been a detailed project documenting multiple formats of street food that are available in the city and studied across other cities in the world, understanding the various social, physical and economic transformations that they have on the urban environment, and projecting further typologies of street food across the city creating identity and income for different neighbourhoods. The lack of this detailed information is the ambition of this project.