VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Across rapidly urbanising cities, rivers are being reduced from living ecological systems to managed infrastructure. This is the logical outcome of growth narratives that have no framework for valuing what cannot be measured economically. Nowhere is this more visible than in Bengaluru, where a tech-driven urban renaissance has been built at the cost of its ecological and cultural foundations. The Vrishabhavathi, the only river to originate within the city, embodies this contradiction. Once sacred, its waters were central to the ritual and daily life of Basavanagudi, one of Bengaluru’s oldest neighbourhoods and the site of the river’s origin. Today it is labelled a “nala” — a drain — on digital maps. It passes through the campus of RV College of Engineering, eighty years old, unacknowledged and untaught. Bengaluru’s smart city ambitions have produced no vision for the river beneath them. The physical degradation is visible. The deeper loss is not. The communities who lived with the Vrishabhavathi — holding its seasonal rhythms, its sacred geographies, its ecological memory — have been displaced by decades of urban growth. The city’s migrant population, absorbed into its economy, was never given a cultural orientation to the place it now inhabits. Theories of place memory, topophilia, and intangible cultural heritage offer a language for this loss. They have never entered planning or design practice. Through historical maps, archival sources, and site documentation of the origin point in Basavanagudi, this paper examines how the river’s physical erasure has been accompanied by the dissolution of public ecological memory. It argues that restoring the Vrishabhavathi requires restoring the ecological literacy of the city around it and reintroducing these neglected frameworks to design practice. For designers in an age of smart city technology, the task is not to innovate forward but to walk backwards — to the knowledge abandoned before the building began.