Volume 18, Number 1 Article by Srinivas Gunta March, 2006
Network City: Planning the Information Society in Bangalore : By James Heitzman, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 368, Price: Rs. 795 (cloth).
Given the rapid development of Bangalore over the last two decades with the city becoming an attractive destination for sunrise industries in the services arena, it becomes imperative to understand the factors that have led to the transformation of this city. It has important implications for policy formulation and implementation. In the face of the oft-repeated comment that India has no sense of history, largely based on the lack of documentation, it is all the more admirable to find this book dealing with the emergence of Bangalore as a Network city through its evolution over the last four centuries – fulfilling the role of a historical account as well as a pointer to the role of policy in an increasingly globalised world. Heitzman not only documents the evolution of the city but also weaves this case study into theoretical perspectives.
In an era of rapid globalisation, it is no longer firms but regions that compete with one another1. While it appears paradoxical that regions become important in an increasingly seamless world, it is nevertheless true as innovation systems typically thrive when firms are spatially co-located and not when they are apart. Drawing from his study extensively, Heitzman proposes that ‘the city’ and ‘information’ can be understood as the dual organising principles of 21st century thought and action. This is both an innovative hypothesis, and an intuitively appealing one. ent.
As a part of the introduction, the author looks at literature encompassing bodies of social theory such as the information society, globalisation and technopoles in order to understand the linkages that his study has with these theories. He juxtaposes the cybernetic model which privileges control with the complexity model that stresses interaction, showing them to be opposites. He similarly contrasts the structural sociology perspective with that of network externalities. The author’s clear purpose is not to define either information or the information society, but to study perceptions of people and the models with which they operate
The chapter on ‘The Making of an Indian City’ looks at the evolution of Bangalore from the days of its founder Kempe Gowda to the advent of the 1990s. Bangalore has had a widely dispersed industrial development, very different from that of European and US cities. The first electrified city in the country (1900), Bangalore developed rapidly in the areas of education (Indian Institute of Science, 1911) and industrial development (HAL, 1940; ITI, 1948). The 1971 census showed the increasing cosmopolitanism of Bangalore Urban district, with only 37% of the population composed of native Kannadigas. Among several reasons advanced for the rapid development of Bangalore in the early to mid 20th century are a salubrious climate, availability of cheap power and abundant steel, the historical legacy of the Mysore state and the city’s safe distance from Pakistan. However, within these factors, the relative importance of each and the interaction effects among these are not given adequate attention by the author. This chapter also throws light on the tension between the bureaucracy and the local government through the 1970s to the 1990s.
The author finds it surprising that people in Bangalore seemed to view planning and urban development as an oxymoron. The de-emphasis on the city in public discourse and the rapid deterioration of the city from a model city to one beset with problems (‘Imagining the City at the End of the Millennium’) contributed to a large extent to the cynicism of the general public about the planning process. Even as late as 1991, Bangalore was not comparable to cities of the developed world, though it did much better than the rest of Karnataka and India on several socio-economic parameters. A small case on the evolution of GIS use for planning purposes brings out how non-governmental firms and networks also started playing an active role in the development of the city. The fundamental shift of the government of the day from a developmental state to a coordinating state is depicted effectively through the case.
While NGOs seem to be playing an active part in the affairs of the city, the contribution of the general populace is marked more by its absence than its participation. This is brought out clearly in a case study on the Nagarapalika Act where the number of people who arrived at a meeting to discuss the act under the auspices of an active local NGO was miniscule. This can be construed as either the hollowness of local democracy or the disenchantment of the people, born of previous experience. The chapter ‘The Third Force and Governance’ throws light on the efforts of NGOs to foster a sense of community and bring about coordinated action
The chapter on ‘Becoming Silicon Valley’ establishes the importance of state intervention and the role played by large firms in making Bangalore what it is. Also, the city best epitomises the shift from public sector to private sector in the post-liberalisation era. While comparisons of Bangalore with Silicon Valley were made as early as 1987, this was more a mantra than a reality.
In ‘The Informatization of the City’, Heitzman traces the evolution of the city in the fields of education, media and telematics. In the field of education, low levels of literacy were ameliorated and, as early as late 1940s, there was a good choice for higher education. Spin-offs from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) such as the Raman Research Institute, the Central Power Research Institute and the National Institute of Advanced Studies also helped in furthering research. However, as far as industrial development in the city was concerned, it was the presence of IISc or more importantly ‘the idea of the presence of IISc’ in the city that acted as a magnet rather than any role played by IISc per se. In the field of media, rapid growth in the areas of print, radio, television and talkies meant that the city was on a firm path to informatisation with the 1980s acting as an inflexion point. The case on digital turn is rich in detail but no inferences are made as the description lends itself to several analyses depending on the context applied. For example, the same case could be used to draw inferences about the public sector’s technology phobia or to establish the capacity of the city in adapting to new changes within a short period.
In the concluding chapter, the author looks at how informatisation brought about not just a process of literacy growth and availability of structured quality of information but also profound social and spatial discontinuities. Among the organisational changes in the city were the differentiation of previously monolithic public utilities (e.g. farming out power generation, transmission and distribution to different entities), changes in internal dynamics accompanying the external orientation of business firms, and the emergence of inter-organisational consulting networks. At the same time, there were some continuities as well, such as the prevalence and relevance of state power remaining undiminished. The author rightly points out that while the beauty of the informational model lies in transparency, expansion of channels and stress on competency, the flip side to it is that there may be efforts at increased obfuscation.
Apart from field visits and perusal of archival data, elements of action research also exist in the research methodology due to the active participation of the author in an important NGO. The research also has ethnographic components, as the author immerses himself fully in the milieu that he is researching; for example, he lived for several months in a narrow four-storey home in the old city that housed fifteen tenants (p. 225).
Bangalore as reflected in the author’s work, whether consciously or unconsciously, comprises several bipolarities: the development and the culture of the city area vis-à-vis those of the Cantonment area; the priorities of urban bureaucracy vis-à-vis those of rural polity; informatisation for organised markets (real estate) as against informality for unorganised markets (ironing clothes); and informational components’ response to global imperatives as contrasted with non-informational components’ response to local imperatives. It would have been interesting to see how each of these bipolarities impacted the informatisation of the city. More important would have been to identify what causes and what sustains these bipolarities. For example, in the case of the last mentioned bipolarity, there is evidence to show that the state policy may be responsible for the shift in informational components’ responses, especially in relation to the orientation of the Indian software industry2.
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