The Urban-Climate Nexus: Resilient City-Making Through a Constitutive Communication Lens

CONTENTS 02

Preface

03

01

Introduction

05-11

02

City Making - Recognizing Cities as Complex Living Systems

13-15

03

City’s Big Crisis

17-19

04

Constitutive Communication and City Making

21-32

05

Constitutive Communication and City Making: Conceptual Framework

34-35

06

City Transformation Stories: From the Past to the Future

38-81

07

Framing Climate Resilience in [Indian] Cities

83-84

08

The Big question—Enabling Constitutive Communication in the City Making

86-87

09

Constitutive Communication and the Future of Climate-Resilient Cities

89-90

Acknowledgment and References

91-93

Preface In the past decade, an emerging focus at Integrated Design is work on evolving decentralized climate responsive urban planning frameworks. As cities continue to struggle with increasing informality coupled with inadequate and inefficient basic services, the impacts of changing climates are further exacerbating the quality of life for all stakeholders. Notably, the informal sector in general and the urban poor are disproportionately impacted. Appropriate climate action while a dire need is fast emerging a buzz word.

Our work in this space started with evolving adaptation strategies for the urban poor. As part of these earlier engagements, community organizations and leaders expressed the struggle of the community— largely the urban poor—to understand the ‘jargonised climate science terminology and expressions,’ largely the domain of climate scientists.

Climate literacy as a conduit to effective climate action, we believe, is a small, yet significant step in this direction. Climate change is all about people and the science needs to account for people centrality. We believe this can be achieved through appropriately designed climate communication—one that leverages the everyday vocabularies. We initiated our work on climate literacy in Bhopal and expanded it in the cities of Hubballi-Dharwad and most recently Bangalore. We sought to uncover the shared vocabularies and meanings with a view to informing how climate change manifests within urban systems and how this knowledge can potentially lend itself to resilient urban futures.

As we gathered these vocabularies, what surfaced were a host of vulnerabilities embedded in and triggered by rapid and unhinged urbanization. Clearly, the urban and climate experience is inextricably linked. Coupled with the realization that the link between climate action and urban development is poorly understood, often leading to limited or misdirected responses laid the foundation for this work,

undertaken by the SATTVA Trust, a sister concern of Integrated Design.

The research aims to comprehend the intersectional experience (vulnerabilities) of climate change and urban development as a pathway to inform the making of resilient cities.

The UN-Habitat in its World Cities Report of 2025 acknowledges that the impact of climate change is increasingly urbanized. Climate vulnerability must therefore be conceived through an urban lens, placing cities at the centre of climate action (The World Cities Report 2025).

Yet, how this can be achieved remains a question, one that this research engages with. The research adopts Constitutive Communication as a method and a lens to build resilient cities.

Constitutive communication is not merely a tool for information exchange. Rather it is a process of co-creation, meaning-making and transformative action. In deploying constitutive communication, the research uses constitutive values to tell stories about landscapes and the people inhabiting these. It advocates for a localized approach to city-making moving towards translating policy intent into grounded, inclusive, and transformative urban practices. These stories- at the intersection of the urban and climate experience – are powerful informers to carve pathways to resilient cities. Overall, this work contributes to the broader effort to reimagine planning in Indian cities, moving beyond top-down approaches that often conflict with lived realities, toward processes that are co-creative, communicative, and transformative.

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01. INTRODUCTION 04

Introduction Climate change is amongst the defining concerns of our time, shaping research, policy, and governance discourses across the world. It is neither an overstated anxiety nor a peripheral issue. It is scientifically established global crisis demanding holistic and sustained attention. Its effects cut across spatial scales and systems—natural, social, economic, and institutional—impacting both urban and rural landscapes and settlements, impacting communities – rich, poor and the marginalized. As every dimension of human activity increasingly intertwines with climatic shifts, resilience is no longer an optional priority but a fundamental global necessity.

which is abstract. Research by Sethi and Vinoj (2024) illustrates this dynamic in the Indian context. Using nighttime Land Surface Temperature (NLST) data from 2003 to 2020, the research found that urbanization has significantly contributed to overall warming across 141 Indian cities. The cities of Pune, Raipur, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Patna, Nashik, Ludhiana, Lucknow, Bengaluru, and Vadodara recorded the highest levels of urban-induced warming. Thus, the need for differentiated and locally grounded climate responses that address both the physical manifestations of warming and the unique developmental and ecological contexts of cities. (Sethi & Vinoj, 2024)

Cities, within this context are critical sites for understanding and addressing climate change. Urban areas are now widely recognized as hotspots of climate risk due to population density, complex social and infrastructure systems, and disrupted ecological foundations. This research seeks to understand how cities stakeholders perceive and interpret climate change, how they make sense of its impacts and how this sense making can shape potential climate actions. The research initially started with comprehending and enhancing climate literacy among diverse urban actors. Using Bengaluru in Karnataka as a case, the research sought to uncover the shared vocabularies and meanings that can inform how climate change manifests within urban systems and how this knowledge can potentially lend itself to resilient urban futures.

This recognition of context-specific opportunities for resilience also became evident in the early stages of this research. Stakeholders—

Notably, while some urban centers are already experiencing these challenges acutely, others are only beginning to encounter them (Yemeru, et al., 2024), because of a combination of regional climatic shifts and localized urbanization effects. This variation highlights not only the urgency but also the opportunity for cities to develop proactive and context-specific pathways to resilience, not something

though aware of climatic changes through their lived experiences—often articulated their concerns not directly as effects of climate change but through long-standing urban challenges such as inadequate infrastructure, weak governance, and inequitable access to resources. In other

words, the move towards resilience remains deeply embedded in persistent urban challenges as against one that is exclusively experienced as a climate risk. Yet, current city-making and climate action— in Bengaluru and in other Indian cities are unable and unwilling to engage with this intricate relationship in an integrated and systemic manner (Integrated Design, 2025).

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Globally too, these observations resonate with the key findings of the World Cities Report 2025 by UN-Habitat, which emphasizes that the increasing concentration of people in hazard-prone urban areas means the impact of climate change is increasingly urbanized.

Climate vulnerability must therefore be conceived through an urban lens, placing cities at the center of climate action (The World Cities Report 2025).

Understanding climate action itself remains a key challenge for building urban resilience. Often, the link between climate action and urban development is poorly understood or overlooked, leading to limited or misdirected responses. This situation is particularly relevant to the Indian cities. Despite policy commitments to climate action, sustainability, and resilience, urban planning and climate initiatives remain fragmented, top-down, and insufficiently responsive to local contexts (Integrated Design, 2025). Two interrelated issues lie at the heart of this concern and warrant examination. First, effective climate action must be integrated into the urban development process—a step that could yield significant benefits, particularly for cities where climate extremes and risks are comparatively less acute.1 Second, urban planning as a technocratic exercise, that is insufficiently participatory, and poorly equipped to address the complex realities of urban life is a fundamental challenge. Although both challenges are widely recognized in research and policy discussions, they remain largely unresolved in practice across the Indian urban landscape.

The analysis of world cities in a technical paper by Danan Gu (2019), published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, highlights a 7.6% difference in the number of cities exposed to high-level natural disasters between inland and coastal locations. While this difference alone does not necessitate a dramatic shift in how cities approach climate resilience, it underscores that many other factors—reflecting their diversity—such as development stage, income levels, and SDG regions, also shape the advantages and challenges cities face in implementing climate action. Understanding these differences across multiple scales is essential for both leveraging opportunities and taking proactive measures.

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This research seeks to explore pathways to address these gaps. In doing so, it adopts the process of Constitutive Communication— where communication is not merely a tool for information exchange but a process of co-creation, meaning-making, and transformative action. Premised on its deployment in the metropolis of Bangalore, the research argues that constitutive communication is both a method and a lens to understand and reimagine how climate and urban challenges are interconnected, and how communicative planning practices can foster shared understanding and collective resilience in city.

Beginning with a focus on enhancing climate literacy amongst diverse stakeholders in cities, the inquiry manifested in a fundamental question about the city and its making: If cities are to move from instrumental planning to transformative processes capable of addressing overlapping crises, including climate change, what would that shift look like in practice?

Constitutive communication, an approach that positions communication as both a lens and a method of inquiry for social action, reveals significant possibilities for resilience-building. The evidence and framework presented here aim to support a localized approach to city-making, showing how constitutive communication can translate policy intentions into grounded, inclusive, and transformative urban practices. In doing so, this work contributes to the broader effort to reimagine planning in Indian cities, moving beyond top-down approaches that often conflict with lived realities, toward processes that are co-creative, communicative, and transformative.

While the contextual intricacies of climate and urban action are wellestablished global agendas—and increasingly reflected in national and subnational policies—their translation into tangible change at the ground in India remains limited. Despite consistent emphasis on the local as the foundation of these agendas, local actors are rarely empowered to play a meaningful developmental role. When engaged, they are often instrumentalized towards other objectives rather than to initiate transformative action.

This research addresses this well-recognized gap—not merely as a critique, but by demonstrating a constructive way forward, supported by a framework and evidence from its application.

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Methods and Processes To examine city-making through the lens of constitutive communication, the research employed a series of participatory practical engagement methods involving diverse urban stakeholders and relevant urban datasets. The intention was not to apply a fixed methodology, but to explore what constitutive communication looks like in practice within specific urban contexts—how communicative processes shape, reveal, and reconstitute urban systems, and how leveraging these processes can contribute to building more resilient cities.

Rather than treating communication as a predefined technique or tool, the research approached it as an evolving inquiry. Over time, both the theoretical understanding of constitutive communication and its practical application in urban contexts developed through iterative reflection and engagement. The process unfolded as a learning journey, where methods, data, and analytical lenses evolved in response to emerging insights from the field.

At different stages, the research employed varied forms of inquiry, each engaging with specific groups, issues, and scales of the city.

These interactions generated multiple layers of data: from experiential narratives and spatial observations to collective reflections. The relevance of each process to broader questions of city-making and urban resilience was continually revisited, ensuring that the inquiry remained grounded in lived realities rather than abstract planning assumptions.

as constitutive rather than instrumental can surface hidden relationships, mediate between formal and informal systems, and foster shared understanding as a foundation for resilient urban futures.

Engagement 1: Free Open-Ended Community Narratives This method involved engaging with communities from settlements across the city—particularly those facing intertwined challenges of urbanization and climate impacts. The locations were identified with the assistance of local NGOs and civic organization that have long worked with these communities having a relationship of trust.

With the guidance of these organizations, preliminary insights were gathered to understand local contexts and identify thematic points of discussion. Conversations were conducted through openended questions, encouraging participants to speak freely about their experiences: their lifetime in the settlement, the changes they have witnessed, how those changes have affected their lives and livelihoods, and how they perceive both individual and collective challenges.

The focus remained on keeping the discussions organic and relatable, with minimal direction from the researchers. Discussions around urban change, climate extremes, and their interconnections emerged naturally. These interactions were documented through observations and narrative recordings gathered during focus group discussions and community transect walks, emphasizing how participants articulated their lived realities.

From this wide-ranging set of engagements, methods that yielded significant insights into the dynamics of constitutive communication in city-making are described below. Each of its outcomes discussed in subsequent sections demonstrates how communication, when treated This process revealed that many of the nuanced manifestations of 08

urban vulnerability—often described scientifically as “climate impacts” are deeply embedded in urban challenges that are rarely captured by formal urban planning mechanisms. Such nuances, although critical to understanding city resilience, remain invisible in standardized participatory processes. The data collected through these narratives provided valuable insights into the hidden dynamics of resilience, the everyday coping (and adaptive) capacities, and the social networks that sustain urban life. A recent parallel is that of the COVID-19 pandemic that surfaced similar dynamics, revealing the critical roles of non-mainstream actors in maintaining the continuity of urban systems. Integrating such lived knowledge into urban planning and governance is a critical pillar of resilience building.

Engagement 2: Historical Enquiry of Communities and Landscapes In planning theory, one of the key areas of debate lies in how different theorists understand the relationship and role of the past and the future in shaping space and urban form. This question becomes particularly critical in the context of Indian settlements, which are highly diverse and have evolved through multiple historical layers of colonization, entrenched social hierarchies, uneven development, and contextually rich indigenous cultures that continue to influence contemporary urban realities. In such contexts, a meaningful engagement with the past is not only necessary for understanding the present but also fundamental for envisioning resilient urban futures.

Recognizing this historical depth is essential for grounding urban resilience in both spatial and social continuity.

This process sought to explore how communities perceive and communicate their own histories—how they remember and narrate the transformations of their settlements and landscapes over

time. Rather than treating the past as a fixed set of dates or events, the process focused on uncovering the emotional and experiential dimensions of change: how people felt about transformations in land, livelihood, and relationships, and how they make sense of those shifts today. These historical narratives provided insight into the constitutive meaning of change—how transformations were experienced not just as external impositions but as lived, communicative processes that continue to shape present urban realities. Through these narratives, it became possible to trace the continuities and ruptures between the historical and contemporary city—between what the city once was, what it has become, and what it aspires to be.

To complement these narratives, the research also examined secondary datasets on the city’s landscape history. One particularly valuable yet often overlooked source was the historical revenue data from the Government of Karnataka, available at the village level. These records offered a detailed picture of landforms and usage patterns prior to the rapid urbanization of India, spanning the period from pre- to post-Independence. It helped reconstruct the core principles underlying the landscape’s social, economic, and ecological functioning. Reading this data alongside community memories revealed how the city’s current form often diverges from its foundational logic of development – premised on the lay of the land and its ecology. Reconnecting with those original systems could guide more sustainable and context-responsive futures.

Through this combined process of historical enquiry and participatory interpretation, the method revealed that what may appear as the “chaos” of present-day urbanization often carries the imprints of past decisions and displacements of interests. . Many current urban challenges from ecological degradation to spatial inequity are rooted 09

in historical injustices that remain unaddressed. Conversely, some solutions for contemporary resilience may also lie in the wisdom embedded in past practices, community relationships, and land-based knowledge systems.

While the broader framing of climate change and urban resilience was introduced, participants deeply familiar with the city’s structural challenges at the ground were encouraged to define and document issues and positive aspects as they perceived them.

Embedding such historical readings into urban planning and city-making is therefore not merely a retrospective exercise, but a constitutive act. Doing so requires plural, interconnected ways of knowing that bridge formal datasets with lived memories, and that view diversity not as a weakness but as a foundation for adaptive, inclusive, and communicative city-making.

The thematic focus remained deliberately open, centering broadly on civic issues without imposing fixed categories. Participants were asked to capture photographs that represented the conditions, challenges, and opportunities they observed in their surroundings.

Each photograph was accompanied by a short caption or explanation describing what was happening and why it was significant from their perspective. The diversity of interpretations ranging from direct representations of urban neglect to indirect expressions of resilience was seen as valuable, reflecting the city’s complex realities.

Engagement 3: Photovoice – Revealing the City Through Everyday Lenses Photovoice was adopted as a participatory and communicative method to understand how citizens perceive and articulate the intersections of urban development, everyday challenges, and climaterelated transformations. Conceptualized by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris in 1997, Photovoice enables participants to capture and narrate their lived realities through photographs, giving visibility to conditions often overlooked in formal discourse. Within this research, it operated as a form of constitutive communication—a process through which participants’ visual and narrative expressions became acts of meaning-making that reveal how the city is experienced, negotiated, and reimagined from within.

The process involved a team of active citizens drawn from the NGO partner and their community representatives. Participants were given a brief introduction to the concept of Photovoice and invited to record their observations through a simple digital platform developed in Kobo Collect. The guidance provided was intentionally minimal.

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This open structure ensured that the inquiry remained grounded in lived experiences rather than being directed by the researcher’s assumptions. It sought to reveal what citizens consider most pressing in their everyday urban lives. For instance, while on one side research and policy discussions are around advanced technologies and global best practices in sustainable development, residents’ immediate concerns revolve around something as basic yet urgent as the persistent dumping of waste near their homes, posing severe health hazards. Such issues, though well-known to the city’s administration, often remain unaddressed, pointing to a deeper disconnection between policy priorities and citizens’ realities.

The collected photographs and narratives were analyzed using a framework of Photovoice analysis called SHOWED. The researcher’s point of view in this analysis was to understand more deeply the critical interaction between climate resilience and urban development.

The outcomes of this process evidenced that climate resilience and urban development issues are highly interconnected. Although this relationship is widely recognized at research and policy levels, in implementation or functioning level they are often treated as separate aspects. The idea of urban areas as potential spaces for building climate resilience is largely overlooked, and climate considerations tend to appear as performative gestures rather than real actions. This was clearly observed through this exercise and brought attention to the need to question the current status quo of climate and urban action.

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SHOWED is a framework widely used for Photovoice analysis, introduced by Wallerstein & Bernstein (1988) within empowerment education to promote health across personal and social arenas.

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02.

12

CITY MAKING RECOGNIZING CITIES AS COMPLEX LIVING SYSTEMS

CHINA INDIA

NIGERIA

Urban Population

City Making - Recognizing Cities as Complex Living Systems

1957

2018

2050

30%

55%

66%

Cities of the 21st century are central to the global development agenda, marked by a shift in perspective: from viewing cities solely as the cause of global challenges to recognizing them as vital sources of developmental solutions (United Nations, 2017).

This includes the fight against poverty, inequality, unemployment, climate change, and more (UNHabitat, 2020). As of 2018, over 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a rise from 30% in 1957 (United Nations, 2019). This figure is projected to grow to nearly 68% of the global population by 2050 (United Nations, 2019). The growth is predicted to occur largely in India, China, and Nigeria (UN-Habitat, 2020).

While the definitions of what constitutes a city or the urban varies across contexts, cities are acknowledged to be complex systems, comprising of interconnected social, ecological, and infrastructural systems (Lobo, et al., 2023). Here individuals, communities, organizations, institutions, technologies, infrastructures, and ecosystems are interacting continuously (Markus Schläpfer, Claxton, Smoreda, West, & Ratti, 2014). Alexander, 1965 attempts to capture this complexity in describing the city as a semilattice, in contrast to its understanding as a tree structure where planned cities are designed through compartmentalized, hierarchical structures such as a tree.

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In effect city functioning is far more interwoven—closer to a semilattice where elements overlap, interconnect, and interact in multiple ways as against linearly and or sectorally. Imagining the city as a complex semilattice calls for a fundamental shift in how we think and approach to making cities resilient. (Alexander, 1965) A city inherently functions to maintain its continuity through shocks and stresses—a measure that is in recent times is framed as urban resilience (UN - Habitat, n.d.). City-making recognizes the value of resilience now not only in recovery, but also in enabling transformation toward sustainability. This shift moves beyond siloed approaches, acknowledging that urban systems are deeply interconnected, with multiple actors and factors evolving and interacting in complex, dynamic, and often cascading ways (Dodman, et al., 2022).

Such interconnection was evident in India long before these ideas emerged. Alexander’s observations revealed a superior and remarkable organization achieved through intelligence distributed across networks—manifested in deep, localized knowledge of geography, climate, and cultural diversity, as well as the effective and economical use of local materials. The resulting urban forms were inherently local, buildable, purposeful, and resource (Gabriel & Quillien, 2019).

In the making of Indian cities—or the production of space more generally—the complexity of social, ecological, and infrastructural systems is especially pronounced

This disconnect reinforces a divide between two modes of citymaking: one governed by formal rule and regulations, and the other shaped by informal, everyday negotiations on the ground (Roy, 2009).

Amidst increasing recognition of informality as the dominant mode of urbanization in cities, and a significant, continuous contributor to the economy, there is a growing push within policy and scholarly works in the epistemology of urbanism and urban planning to recenter context as foundational (NITI Ayog, 2021), (Bhan, 2019). However, it is yet to manifest effectively in practice.

In effect, Indian cities are a result of informal processes, reflecting a broader pattern of fragmented and reactive urban planning. This has resulted in a paralysis of development—a complex web of urban challenges that resist simple solutions. Compounding this issue is the lack of institutionalized local governance mechanisms capable of supporting community-led, bottom-up development. The formal (state-led) and informal (community-driven) city making continue to operate in isolation, with little coordination or mutual understanding.

When Alexander was offered the opportunity to design a new town by Indian government, he ultimately turned it down—believing the task was too complex to be approached through a centralized, top-down design process. Such an approach, he argued, would inevitably lead to highly abstract solutions disconnected from the realities on the ground (Gabriel & Quillien, 2019).

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Amidst this superiority, state led Indian city-making has largely been driven by planning paradigms borrowed from the Western world (NITI Ayog, 2021). Framed as landuse plans, these are premised on allocating land to single uses. Notably, these are rarely implemented.

As a result, Indian cities evolved as mixed land use fabrics and allowed for mixed fabrics that have evolved organically, driven largely by people’s everyday needs (Mohan, 2013). Nevertheless, the process of centralized, non-contextual city-making continues to this day, manifesting in a significant disconnect between the planned city and the lived city.

Bridging this gap calls for a move from a top-down, technical exercise focused solely on land-use planning to one that acknowledges continuous process of negotiation (Roy, 2005). Yet, how this can be achieved remains a question. The questions assume an added criticality in the current context of climate crises, discussed in the next Section.

Acknowledging the lived city life— the specific cultural, social, and ecological relationships that shape city-making—is no longer optional; it is essential.

Recognizing cities as living, plural, and context-dependent systems opens new pathways for more inclusive, adaptive, and resilient futures.

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03. THE CITY’S BIG CRISES 16

The City’s Big Crises Cities—one of humanity’s most significant inventions—are at the epicenter of the triple planetary crisis—climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss (UNFCCC, 2022), intensifying challenges from the local to the global, including threatening global peace (UN Security Council, 2021). Existing inequalities, fueling conflict, worsening poverty, and weakening governance and access to basic services are further intensified (Dodman, et al., 2022). This vulnerability is increasingly acknowledged in both scientific and policy discourses.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes that these overlapping pressures significantly reduce the capacity of communities, particularly in urban areas to adapt to climate-related risks (Dodman, et al., 2022).

“Growing urbanization and climate change create complex risks, especially for those cities that already experience poorly planned urban growth, high levels of poverty and unemployment, and a lack of basic services” - Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II, AR6”

Amidst the numerous top-down efforts—international to national— to address cities and the crisis multipliers, there is a growing global recognition of the centrality of local action in achieving effective climate action (UNDP, n.d.). Even as cities emerge as epicenters of climate vulnerability, local action for climate response and human development is at best dismal. By extension, cities find themselves at precarious crossroads, where dysfunctional and weak local governance converges with a rapidly intensifying urban and climate crisis. Without addressing these foundational issues, the global push for climate action risks resulting in serious inaction or misdirected interventions. National and international efforts to tackle the climate crisis may fall short—or even prove counterproductive—if they fail to account for the positionality of Indian cities, the diverse stakeholders, the urgent need to strengthen localized governance, and the critical role of community-driven approaches.

When climate action is pursued merely because it is globally or nationally prioritized—without grounding it in local realities and institutional capacities—it risks becoming symbolic rather than substantive. In such cases, what is labeled and undertaken as climate adaptation may, in effect, result in maladaptation.

(UN Habitat, 2022)

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Cities and Communication At the constitution of the complex interplay between cities, urban crises, resilience, and the actions needed to build that resilience lies information exchange or more specifically, Communication.

Information regulates how cities function and how resources, energy, and decisions flow across both local and global urban systems (Lobo, et al., 2023). This information network is itself complex—neither fully regular nor entirely random (Bettencourt, 2014). The coexistence of planned (formal) and unplanned (informal) interactions creates a unique urban complexity that makes anticipating and managing risk especially difficult (Dodman, et al., 2022).

Understanding cities and city making as communication networks is not a new proposition. The roots of this perspective trace back to Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, which views communication as the basis for social coordination, legitimacy, and meaning making. Despite critiques of its rationalist assumptions, Habermas’s emphasis on language as foundational to human interaction remains relevant.

Communicative action, particularly within planning theory, offers two critical dimensions: a diagnostic function— challenging instrumental rationality—and a constructive function—supporting the normative aims of planning in democratic contexts (Mattila, 2020).

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This theoretical foundation finds renewed urgency in the contemporary Indian contexts. As (Marchal & Stebé, 2014) argue, society in general and the city in particular is an achievement of human communicative processes. Amidst rapid urbanization, where cities sit at the core of global flows, communication becomes inseparable from urban existence. People, ideas, and objects circulate at ever-increasing speeds, rendering physical distances nearly irrelevant. Cities are not just sites of communication—they are constituted by it.

This intrinsic relationship is also reflected etymologically: Communication derives from the Latin word Communicare—to share or to make common—capturing the essence of what a city enables. A city functions through shared meanings, negotiations, and contestations. Yet not all communication supports resilient cities.

Further, communication also works in, between, and against cities.

This complexity, when seen from the perspective of communicative planning, underscores the need for more than transactional models of information exchange in city making (Marchal & Stebé, 2014).

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04.

20

CONSTITUTIVE COMMUNICATION AND CITY MAKING

Constitutive Communication and City Making

Understanding city-making through the lens of communication offers a more grounded and realistic approach to building resilient urban futures. Unlike technical, top-down planning models that treat cities as systems to be engineered, a communicative approach centers societal relationships, dialogue, and meaning-making. This shift is particularly important for urban resilience, which depends not only on physical infrastructure or environmental systems but also on how people interact with one another and with the environments they inhabit.

Cities today demand systems thinking, contextual sensitivity, interdisciplinary collaboration, and participatory processes to address their wicked problems.

It is in this context that the following foundational questions assume significance:

• How do cities emerge and evolve through communicative processes?

• How do we build resilient urban systems through meaningful connections?

While the quantity of communication (i.e., how many actors are involved in the city-making process) is critical, the quality of communication—how meaning is created, how dialogue is structured, and whose knowledge counts—is equally decisive in shaping urban resilience. However, most existing approaches rely on a narrow informational model of communication, where messages are simply transferred from sender to receiver (Janssen, 2013). This model fails to account for the deeper, constitutive role of communication in shaping cities. A complex systems view of communication challenges this model by recognizing that people do not just exchange information—they co-create the social systems they inhabit.

Communication is both transactional (conveying messages) and constitutive (building shared meanings, relationships, and collective norms) (McGreavy, et al., 2015). This recognition potentially opens new ways to understand how cities are made, experienced, and transformed.

Constitutive Communication emerges critical to participatory planning processes. Even when participation is present, in the absence of constitutive nature of communication, engagement may remain symbolic potentially reinforcing existing exclusions. For communication to contribute meaningfully to action for resilience, it must create space for co-creating meaning and recognizing multiple knowledges—both formal and informal. It is an omnidirectional diachronic process of meaning development itself (van Ruler, 2018).

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When conceptualized as a complex system, communication in citymaking rests on the interaction of three interdependent components that establish the conditions for collective action, mediate power relations, and shape how urban resilience is envisioned and pursued.

A singular or uniform application of information, ignoring the diversity of users and channels, also their varied contexts, risks undermining the resilience already present in the system. The typical components of a communication system remain largely the same, as outlined below; however, whether communication is understood as a simple transmission of information or as a continuous process of meaningmaking shaped by the diversity and interaction of these components fundamentally influences how actions are conceived and carried out.

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Outlined below are simplified components of a communication system interacting towards action (Shannon, 1948)

Information: The content being exchanged—ranging from data, policy documents, and technical knowledge to narratives, experiential insights, and lived realities.

This includes both quantitative and qualitative knowledge.

A Communication System (conceptualized as complex and dynamic)

Information Users: All actors who engage with and act on information—planners, government officials, civil society, informal workers, citizens, institutions, and grassroots groups. Each interprets information through different lenses shaped by their positionality, expertise, and experience.

Recognizing the constitutive value of diverse actors—from formal actors and institutions to informal city-makers is essential - a foundational strategy for resilience.

Communication Channels: The mediums through which information flows and dialogue occurs—such as digital platforms, traditional media, participatory workshops, public forums, everyday interactions, and both formal and informal processes of governance.

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Climate Communication as a Case Communication is not only central to city-making—it is fundamental to the functioning of all human societies. One way to approach contextual, place-based city-making is by emphasizing the constitutive value of information being transmitted during planning and decisionmaking. A particularly illustrative example of this is found in the domain of climate communication, one of the most expansive and complex communication efforts currently underway at global and local scales. Diverse actors are engaged in climate communication—from scientists and researchers to policymakers, practitioners, educators, and community organizers. A key domain is that of the climate science community. While this community has contributed significantly to generating and sharing knowledge about the climate crisis, there is a recognition that science alone cannot solve the problem. Addressing climate change—especially as its impacts become increasingly local— requires collective action, and at the heart of such action lies effective, meaningful communication. While there is a wealth of information available about the causes, impacts, and possible solutions to climate change and diverse stakeholders - from national leaders to local communities, students to decision-makers—have become information users how, how people interpret and respond to climate information varies greatly.

Climate communication occurs across diverse channels—including academic research, weather forecasts, public education campaigns, climate literacy programs, policy documents, traditional and digital media, and community engagement efforts. However, access to these channels and the impact remains uneven, particularly in the Global South, where linguistic, cultural, epistemic, social, and infrastructural diversity poses significant challenges. In such complex and varied landscapes, standardized or universal communication approaches often fail to resonate or reach effectively.

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As a transactional activity—focused on delivering facts, data, and recommendations—climate communication efforts in many regions, including parts of the global South, are well-developed. However, what is often overlooked is the constitutive dimension of climate communication. Even when the importance of this constitutive aspect is acknowledged, there remains limited guidance and institutional support for how to implement it effectively in diverse local contexts.

There is a noticeable gap in mainstream climate and planning communities, where the focus remains largely on information dissemination rather than the relational and cultural interventions critical to co-create meaningful responses to climate challenges.

A widely discussed classical case in climate communication is the 2017 image of a starving polar bear on Baffin Island, which became a global symbol of climate change.

Shared broadly with the caption “This is what climate change looks like”, the image generated strong emotional responses and fueled conversations around melting ice caps and global warming. However, it also attracted criticism for unintentionally alienating parts of the public. Critics argued that portraying climate change through the lens of the Arctic—a distant, icy, and seemingly otherworldly environment—reinforced the idea that the issue is remote and disconnected from most people’s daily lives. This narrative risked making climate change appear as a problem of the Global North, far removed from the immediate realities faced by many communities around the world.

In response to these concerns, climate journalists and communicators began to shift away from the overuse of symbolic polar bears. Instead, they focused on more human-centered narratives that depict the real and present-day impacts of climate change on people and places familiar to specific audiences.

This shift has since informed broader climate communication practices, which now emphasize the importance of conveying real-world impacts, connecting messages to the values and lived experiences of communities, and using storytelling to humanize the issue.

Moreover, the inclusion of indigenous knowledge, local dialects, and culturally grounded narratives has become increasingly recognized as essential. These practices help make climate communication more inclusive and contextually relevant, fostering stronger public engagement and behavioral change.

This evolution reflects a deeper understanding of communication not just as a vehicle for information, but as a constitutive force that shapes collective meaning and action. Understanding the constitutive nature of communication is essential not only for climate action but also for more inclusive and resilient approaches to city-making.

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Climate Literacy – How Does It Look Like, and What Does It Call For? Understanding climate change impacts and action remains a key challenge for building resilience in cities and more generally in societies. Climate literacy is an essential strategy to enable society to integrate climate considerations into all aspects of decision-making.

An initial exploration included children and youth groups from diverse socio-economic and professional backgrounds across the city.4 The idea was to explore how climate literacy can become constitutive rather than transactional. The initiative was designed in the form of interactive workshops. Stakeholders were informed and guided to reflect on what constitutive climate action could mean in their own contexts, while also contributing their perspectives and suggestions on how these ideas could be extended to other groups.

This created a reciprocal and participatory process—a shared exercise in learning and reflection that helped deepen the collective understanding of what a constitutive approach to climate literacy might look like in practice. The process highlighted that when climate literacy is approached as a communicative, co-creative, and contextually grounded practice, it holds the potential to significantly strengthen the capacity of cities to become adaptive, aware, and resilient.

Similarly, among liberal arts students, conceptual discussions around greenhouse gas emissions, climate justice, and related themes quickly expanded into wide-ranging reflections—starting from examining the status quo, questioning what they know and do not know, moving toward personal reflections of individuals and communities, and finally engaging with systems and systems philosophies.

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Broad Range of Interconnected Themes Consumer Economics Burn-out due to Profit-Driven Work Cultures Fear Mongering Profit Maximization Models Political and Systematic Inertia Greenwashing Colonial Inheritance Social Media and Mob Mentality Electric Vehicles as Greenwashed Solutions Eco-Anxiety Local Empowerment Youth Participation in Climate Action Fast Fashion Ethical Use of Technology Western Bias in Mainstream Climate Discourse Helplessness Among Youth Education System with Weak Environmental Values These discussions eventually unfolded into broader philosophical reflections on the nature of human responsibility, collective action, and the cultural conditions shaping climate understanding and response.

4 Integrated Design collaborated with the Center for Public Impact on a project called Decoding Climate Science. The project aimed to understand how people from different social groups experience climate-related stress caused by heat, drought, and flooding. Its goal was to ensure these insights could inform climate science, bridging the gap between research, policy, and the lived realities of communities affected by climate change.

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Added to this was another climate literacy exercise conducted with children from urban poor communities, which organically evolved a unique set of vocabularies grounded in their contextual and cultural realities. The approach taken by the NGO facilitators to engage these children in such conversations revealed insightful and innovative ways in which climate ideas can be localized and internalized—not through abstract or conceptual language, but through lived experience and everyday metaphors.

The engagements toward context-driven approaches to climate literacy proved valuable. In not aiming to understanding literacy in its literal sense—as the act of educating or informing individuals—these outcomes would not have emerged. We argue that climate literacy is not simply about acquiring knowledge or understanding terminology; it is about fostering the capacity to think, communicate, and act. True climate literacy extends beyond learning to enable action through cocreated meaning, dialogue, and shared reflection.

If climate literacy itself is understood only in its transactional form—as the unidirectional transmission of information—then its extension, climate action, will inevitably be shaped by the same limitations. This recognition, felt and reflected through the initial processes of the study, became the foundation of this research: to use constitutive communication as a lens to address the intertwined urban and climate challenges for cities which need them.

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05.

CONSTITUTIVE COMMUNICATION AND CITY MAKING: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

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CITY TRANSFORMATION STORIES: FROM THE PAST TO THE FUTURE

City Transformation Stories: From the Past to the Future As cities transform, the urban poor are amongst the most sidelined.

Their realities, struggles, and constitutive roles in shaping urban spaces and associated life are invisible in dominant planning narratives. In Bengaluru, where distress migration continues to grow, the urban poor constitute both the newly arriving vulnerable and the historically rooted urban poor. Both are grappling with layered and compounding urban crises.

Amidst rapid urbanization, ‘urban development’ often precedes meaningful understanding of the city by formal systems of planning. Even when planners attempt to engage, the capacity, the frameworks and tools available to them are rigid, top-down, and reductionist—approaching complex urban issues through segmented lenses and siloed methodologies. Such approaches are insufficient, particularly when dealing with informal settlements that defy singular categorization and exist in a space that is socially, economically, and ecologically entangled with the rest of the city.

Comprehending the constitutive meaning underpinning informal urban poor settlements—those that the formal plan and policy registers fail to and or avoid working with is a way forward. As is evident from the stories in the rest of this Section, informal urban poor settlements are not outside of the city, but rather the constitutive ‘outside’ that the planned city fails to acknowledge.

These do not start out as informal; they are part of the city’s origins and have become informal only because the planned city chose to treat them as the outside—pushing them to the margins, intentionally or unintentionally.

The stories speak to the deepening of the long-standing urban contradictions amidst a climate crisis, evidencing the increasingly urbanized nature of climate change impacts. 5

This disjuncture assumes urgency with escalating climate crises impacting informal settlements in differential, disproportionate, and deeply embodied ways. A multi-pronged and phased approach is essential in addressing these realities. Waiting for formal policy and infrastructure systems to catch up is neither adequate nor equitable.

Urban responses must move beyond plans that operate in isolation.

Instead, these should coordinate formal systems with adaptive, grounded, and relational modes of action. This includes working through phased interventions, with flexible strategies that can respond to both immediate needs and long-term resilience.

Secondary datasets, such as revenue records, were critical to these story narratives. The data presented here should be understood as a balance between qualitative and quantitative insights. These are neither entirely fictional stories nor a complete representation of the entire population living in the settlements.

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KRISHNAYANA PALYA

From Agrarian Abundance to Urban Precarity The Krishnayana Palya “slum,” sits tightly packed between high-rise buildings and arterial roads in Bengaluru. Beneath its image of urban congestion and poverty lies a layered history—one that dates back over 80 years—of Krishnanuru Majare (settlement or small town).

Once a thriving agrarian settlement on the outskirts of Bengaluru city, Krishnayana Palya was defined not by density or deprivation, but by resource richness, open land, and agricultural livelihoods.

Oral histories recall a landscape of grape cultivation, grazing lands, and community water systems—kuntes (ponds), and Baavis (wells)— that supported daily life. The Anjaneya and Mariyamman temples of today, were once surrounded by clustered homes of a much smaller population—just a fraction of today’s crowded settlement. What now appears as a chaotic maze of buildings—some 5 to 6 storeys high in cramped plots—was once open, breathable land.

Historical revenue records across nine adjacent villages list 101 Kapile Baavis (traditional wells that used oxen to drive a pulley system for lifting water), and 99 Baavis. Most of these have likely been buried or erased under a vertical city fabric that offers no room for nature or light today.

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The losses go far beyond the comfort of sunlight and cool homes.

Historical revenue records show a richly interwoven environment, with tree cover, lakes, and agricultural lands carefully aligned with the natural topography. Settlements and houses were dispersed across the medium altitude landscape, leaving the lowest-lying areas for wells and water bodies, while agricultural land and open spaces leveraged the contours of the land. This system not only supported livelihoods but also reflected a deeply embedded ecological logic.

“Summers turn homes into ovens; winters block out sunlight” Resident, KP

From Bandi Daris to Metro Tracks: The Irony of Connectivity

Krishnanuru was not connected by expressways or metro lines, rather by bandi daris (cart tracks) linking surrounding villages and towns.

Movement meant human connection and access to markets, to water amongst others.

Today mobility has assumed a paradoxical turn. Surrounded by major roads and national highways (connecting to Mysuru, Chennai, Devanahalli, and Hosur) and serviced by a metro station (Bayappanahalli) less than a kilometer away, Krishnayana Palya should be amongst the better-connected parts of the city. Yet, for the resident community, these infrastructures symbolize exclusion. The new infrastructures erased tree covers, strained local ecology, and displaced local economies without mediation. Although land values increased and residents benefited through rental income and joint development opportunities, these gains came at a cost. Basic services and building bylaws are neglected, and institutional support for sustainable development is clearly lacking.

“No matter how many roads are built, traffic will always increase and overwhelm us — leaving no space” (Resident Krishnayana Palya).

This is more than a local grievance; it encapsulates the irony of carcentric urban planning—the more roads that are built, the further the poor are pushed to the margins, both directly and indirectly.

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Further east, the shape of the lakes speaks of transformation.

Benninganahalli Lake, once large and open, now presses against a tight cluster of factories along its northeastern edge [case 2 on the map]. B. Narayanapura Lake, formerly much larger, has contracted as encroachments took hold on its eastern side [case 3 on the map]. These shrinking outlines mark a slow erasure of the water structures that once tied the landscape together.

Towards the North, an intermediate elevation neither high nor low— historical records mark the presence of three lakes. Given the topography, the catchment area is relatively small, rendering these water bodies seasonal and fragile, yet vital connectors in the local hydrology. Over time, this fragility became vulnerability.

Of the numerous lakes in the area, Banaswadi Lake [case 4 on the map], survives in its altered form. Its edges have been trimmed, and the area now functions as a green space known as the Banaswadi Mini Forest.

Dense trees cast deep shade, and water still drains through the ground, though the lake’s ability to hold and channel water stands diminished, 36

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To the South, between the small lakes of Bagame and Kelagiankare, the ground once held a dense concentration of wells [case 1 on the map]. That stretch is now covered by IT offices and layers of modern construction.

Beneath these buildings lies a network of wells—unseen by any, but still part of the land’s long story.

Ca

As per the revenue data [Refer Maps], this landscape was shaped a living network of wells and lakes that responded to the rhythms of rain, soil, and season. Wells stood close together then, deep and dependable, anchoring the community’s water security. Their presence is almost impossible to imagine within today’s tightly packed cityscape, where economic urgency takes significance over ecological necessity. Yet the memory of water still lingers in the terrain.

ma n

As Wells and Lakes Are Buried, So Is the Intelligence of the Land

disrupted by subtle changes within the terrain and the built structures surrounding it.

The second lake [case 5 on the map] has been partially consumed by dense construction near the Steel Authority of India. The remnant— an area with some tree cover and a reduced pool of water—is now known as Kasturi Nagar Lake, a fragment lingering between roads and buildings.

The third lake [case 6 on the map] has vanished entirely. Just West of the India Telephone Industries campus in Ramamurthy Nagar, buildings now occupy its area, leaving no visible trace of the water body recorded in older maps.

These mid-elevation lakes differed from the lower-lying ones that retain water for most of the year. With smaller catchments and softer, less defined boundaries, they were easily absorbed into built patterns, despite their essential role in the traditional water system.

Waterbody 1 in the middle altitude

Waterbody 2 Catchment Range

(Larger basin that also contains Waterbody 1’s catchment) Large Catchment - More Runoff Water - More Perennial -Less Vulnerable

Waterbody 1 Catchment Range Small Catchment - Less Runoff Water - Less Perennial - More Vulnerable

Waterbody 1 in the lower altitude

Across the landscape, modifications executed without recognizing the interconnected logic of the hydrological network have weakened the resilience of the entire system. The loss of smaller components has compounded the vulnerability of surrounding neighborhoods, revealing the long-term consequences of overriding the land’s original ecological design.

The terrain served as the primary guide for how land was used, shaping settlement patterns that were both ecologically sensitive and socially grounded. Traditional landscapes across the region reveal a recurring logic: land occupation evolved directly from natural systems, and communities developed cultural and occupation practices that reinforced ecological stability over generations. The mid-elevation lakes around Krishnayana Palya, for instance, were accompanied by settlement hamlets in historical revenue records, evidence of a longstanding relationship between people, water, and terrain.

These arrangements carry deeply embedded knowledge systems: understanding of the slope, soil, water flow, and seasonal rhythms that enabled communities to maximize the land’s capacity while maintaining ecological resilience.

Whether such systemic, terrain-based thinking can be meaningfully revived within contemporary urban development paradigm in the contemporary city remains a question. What is clear is that planning approaches are comfortable treating land as a blank canvas—a tabula rasa shaped by overriding economic pursuits. In the process, the intrinsic connections between terrain, community knowledge, and longstanding Work done at Integrated Design reveals many comparable landscape patterns—for example, in Ranchi, where households traditionally occupy patterns of occupation are disregarded and erased. Today’s planning and development systems function on the assumption that the city is a blank the mid-lands, fragile ecological zones are preserved as sacred groves slate that needs to be modeled towards enhancing economic gains. Yet or culturally significant spaces, and lower-lying areas are dedicated to this convenience comes at the cost of long-term resilience. agriculture.

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Krishnayana Palya: A City’s Unwritten History Slums like Krishnayana Palya are often treated as outliers in the formal plan and policy- invisible to both government planning and private development. Bengaluru has long served as a critical research hub for defense systems in India. Yet the communities that enabled this transformation are systematically excluded from the benefits.

Going back to the post-independence period, this area saw the establishment of major defence and public sector institutions—the Indian Army’s Pioneer Corps, BEML, HAL, AERO, the Electronics and Radar Development Establishment, the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and DRDO’s LRDE. Adjacent to Krishnayana Palya stands the old NGEF industrial complex. These institutions didn’t appear in isolation—they were built, maintained, and supported by labour from the very communities now classified as “slums.” Residents of Krishnayana Palya, particularly women, have worked as construction labourers, cleaners, and domestic workers in these establishments.

These communities were integral to the functioning of these institutions—long before the IT boom began redefining the city’s economy.

Rather than being integrated into the city’s growth narrative, communities find themselves marginalized by it—beneficiaries in theory but overlooked in practice.

The metro construction brought in a host of migrants largely from Odisha seeking employment and shelter. This demographic shift—unmanaged and unsupported—led to resentment amongst the long-time residents:

“They [the migrants] don’t keep the area clean,” or “They [the migrants] undercut wages.”

These cultural conflicts are in fact planning failures. Without systems (for instance an effective solid waste management) to absorb the impacts of this migration, inequality is further exacerbated.

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The air quality is poor. Summers bring water shortages, leading to conflict between owners and tenants over access. Many households must purchase expensive water from private tankers, bearing the cost of failed infrastructure.

Krishnayana Palya is not an exception—it reflects a larger truth about Indian cities.

What formal planning often erases or excludes is not just land, but memory, labour, and contribution. Agrarian settlements like this became slums not because they failed to modernise, but because the city failed to recognise them as part of its own. Even as infrastructure grows around them, it is often built on top of—not with—the communities who first made these spaces livable. The story of Bengaluru is incomplete without Krishnayana Palya. But in most official maps, plans, and visions of the future—it doesn’t appear at all or appears in the margins.

Today, these same communities live with the compounded effects of exclusion, urban neglect, and climate vulnerability.

They lack access to green spaces, struggle to get fresh air and sunlight in their homes, and face escalating everyday conflicts over basic needs.

With the intensifying impacts of climate change, the settlement is experiencing unbearable indoor heat, and seasonal flooding—often worsened by clogged drains and inadequate waste management. These environmental pressures translate directly into health risks, especially for elderly residents, pregnant women, and children.

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Even within settlements like Krishnayana Palya, inequality persists.

Some roads—particularly those inhabited by influential landlords have witnessed development through negotiations with the city. Others in the low-lying areas remain underdeveloped, and vulnerable to flooding and poor living conditions.

They facilitate collective discussions on basic social development needs. For instance, in line with the communities for better education for its children, community leaders are engaging with the entrenched power dynamics around education. Yet, barriers such as legacy debt and informal moneylending are intimidating roadblocks.

There have been small but symbolic shifts. For instance, residents who were once denied entry into the local Anjaneya temple have now gained access—a sign of changing social dynamics. Working quietly in the background are community mediators—individuals and groups who bridge the gap between residents and the state.

Around 10–15 years ago, several marginalized families fell into cycles of debt with local moneylenders (dominant community groups).

Unable to repay, some were forced into bonded arrangements, with children put to menial tasks. These exploitative relationships continue to exist in different forms. Moneylenders actively block access to external financial aid, wanting to maintain control over the community’s financial life. In response, mediators have spent years trying to establish access to formal credit systems as an alternative.

Beyond financial struggles, these mediators also address other critical issues—gender inequality, domestic violence, and lack of access to government schemes meant for people in informal work sectors.

Progress is often challenged by internal community tensions, shifting priorities of the city, corruption in public systems, and selective gatekeeping by local actors when benefits are distributed.

Amidst all this, the aspirations of those living “within the edges of the edges” remain modest, yet vital: decent roads, functioning drainage, and solutions for their sandhu pondhu—the narrow, congested streets - that make funerals and medical emergencies nearly impossible to manage.

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While the work of mediators has made visible strides in improving living conditions and dignity, countless similar communities remain excluded—not because their needs are invisible, but because the city lacks a scalable and grounded system to understand and address them.

Urban climate plans speak of social safety nets, but “safety” is not same universally. What feels secure to the city’s high-income group is far removed from what safety means for the slum and its residents. A climate-resilient city needs an approach that is multi-pronged, crosssectoral, and inductive—one that doesn’t apply technical fixes but listens, learns, and adapts with communities at the core.

R e s i l i e n ce c a n n o t b e re d u ce d to g re e n cove r re s to ra t i o n o r e n g i n e e re d d ra i n a g e sys te m s a l o n e . I t re q u i re s co n s t i t u t i ve t h i n ki n g a n d co n s i s te n t e n g a g e m e n t : a c i ty t h a t d o e s n’ t j u s t b u i l d a ro u n d i t s m o s t v u l n e ra b l e b u t builds with them.

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KRISHNAYANA PALYA

1

Dense wells converted to IT development and modern construction

2

Large, open lake to a reduced size lake; edges press against factories

3

Large lake to contracted due to encroachments

4

Mid-elevation, seasonal lake to Contracted in size and now used as Banaswadi Mini Forest; water function diminished

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Mid-elevation lake to partially retained with reduced water and tree cover

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Mid-elevation lake to Completely vanished; area now built over

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Ambedkar Nagar

Ambedkar Nagar, once known as Pattandur Gutte (hilltop) is a part of Whitefield. The Gutte was never a product of formal planning. Nor can it boast of a productive agrarian legacy. Unlike Krishnayana Palya that had agricultural roots, this hill on the outskirts of Bengaluru was a space for grazing and social and religious gatherings. It was never seen as ‘productive’ land. Rather it is known as a space of collective sacredness.

Long before roads and apartment buildings reached this side of the city, the hillock served as the heart of a unique Dussehra ritual.

Each year, over a hundred deities from surrounding villages were carried in grand processions to this elevated site. It was more than just a festival—it was a symbolic congregation of belief systems tied to land, agriculture, and seasons. Here, the hilltop became a shared sacred geography—spiritual commons—that bonded distant villages in mutual prayers for protection and agricultural prosperity.

As the city crept in, this collective ritual space began shrinking.

The number of participating villages has now fallen to less than 40.

The once expansive ritual ground has been reduced to a temple, a small playground, and a shed for community meetings—shrinking along with the memory of what this land once represented.

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For many years, the residents of Ambedkar Nagar lived without land security. With no formal titles or documentation, their hold on the land was uncertain, the threat of displacement loming large That changed in recent years when a court ruling, supported by local political advocacy, allowed the community to remain on the land. Residents applied for Hakku Patras (land tenure documents provided under Governemnt of Karnataka’s Ambedkar Rural Housing Scheme). These papers are not just legal ownership.

Rather, these afford recognition, protection, and dignity for the residents This is how Pattandur Gutte became Ambedkar Nagar. Yet, rights on paper have not guaranteed full progress of social development on the ground. Despite legal safeguards, land transactions have continued informally, often favouring more powerful actors of the city. As the area got included into Bengaluru municipal area and urbanisation intensified, speculative forces reshaped the surroundings and the settlement. The landscape of Whitefield shifted from one of agrarian and ecological wealth to a high-value IT and real estate zone—leaving behind the very people who had lived here through its many transformations.

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Unequal Heights, Hard Climb

“When our roofs damage with a strong rain, where would we even fix an AC, even if we could afford one?”

(Resident Ambedkar Nagar)

Pov

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Urban development to Ambedkar Nagar has not come evenly. The hill that once united communities through worship is now stratified by wealth and infrastructure. The top of the gutte is lined with multistorey houses, tall paying guest accommodations, and relatively wellserviced (water is being supplied here) buildings. But further down the hill—especially near the graveyard at the bottom—the reality is starkly different.

During heavy rains, poor drainage leads to floods, particularly in the lower-lying areas. Waste dumped uphill leads to clogging stormwater drains at the bottom of the hill. Tin-roofed houses at the base of the hill are both fragile and unbearably hot in summer 50

Water scarcity, heat stress, water inundation, and poor sanitation converge into a perfect storm of daily hardship. Medical expenses are soaring—some families report spending ₹4000 a month just on health, despite doing manual labour to survive. In a cruel twist of the urban, those at the highest point—geographically—have gained the share of urban benefits, while those pushed to the edges continue to bear the weight of uneven and unsustainable development.

Beyond environmental and infrastructural inequality, there are deeper social strains. Dominant amongst these is poor educational access and growing drug abuse amongst the youth. Like in Krishnayana Palya, some community members here, along with local mediators have started working with affected youth, slowly building paths out of addiction through care and dialogue. And yet, despite the fragmentation and hardships, Ambedkar Nagar continues to hold itself together. The community has asserted its right to remain, to belong, and to be counted—through legal recognition, social resilience, and continued cultural practices. The Dussehra gathering still takes place each year on the Gutte drawing together memories of land, belief, and shared histories.

In a city where transformation so often erases the past, Ambedkar Nagar stands as a quiet act of resistance. It is a place where memory is not just nostalgia—but survival. Justice in such places cannot be delivered by a singular policy alone—it must be negotiated through inclusive urban processes that have space for recognizing these lived experiences, respecting cultural histories, and responding to the needs of vulnerable communities. In the absence of a coordinated approach (across sectors, scales, and governance structures) the risks are grave.

“The loss of youth to drug abuse in this community is not merely a personal tragedy, but a reflection of deeper systemic failure—one that, if left unaddressed, diminishes the city.”

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GUNDAPPA COLONY Perhaps nothing speaks more to their resilience than the way the community gathered to participate in the engagement process.

The only available space large enough to bring together 10 to 15 people was an Anganwadi that had been created by repurposing an unused public toilet block. This small, improvised adaptive structure became the site for community conversations.

The residents of Gundappa Colony, mainly urban migrants came to Bengaluru in search of livelihoods. Most women work as domestic workers in nearby apartment complexes, while men are employed as construction workers (some locally, some as seasonal migrants), auto drivers, catering staff, and daily-wage laborers. Yet, like many migrant communities, their arrival placed them in uncertain and informal spaces—physically marginal, legally ambiguous, and socially overlooked.

Gundappa Colony in the heart of the city sits on a small parcel of land, sandwiched between layers of urban growth. With most houses of temporary roofs, the colony is congested. As families grow, the already small homes are further subdivided, intensifying cramped conditions with many domestic activities spilling outside the house. The environmental quality is poor, sanitation and other basic infrastructure is either absent or inadequate.

While residents possess Parichaya Patras (documents that acknowledge longterm residence and can help lay claim to ownership) as against Hakku Patras (legal land tenure documents), their claim to their homes remains precarious with eviction insecurities lingering in the air.

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The colony is not a squatter development that emerged after the city’s growth. It has existed for over 50 years, beginning as a sparse cluster of huts surrounded by vast green vegetation and forest trees. But further in times, an establishment of a city Hospital pushed the colony into tighter corners.

Where the Living Sat with the Dead - Mr. Gundappa and Others In the northern corner of this tightly packed settlement stands a huge banyan tree—and beneath it, a graveyard. This is where the grave of Gundappa, a man respected for facilitating the settlement of the land, sits. His name lives on in the colony’s name, and his resting place anchors its collective memory.

The graveyard evidences decades of life, death, and continuity. This site is not only about the dead—it has long served the living. The graveyard and the banyan tree constitute community commons where the community gathered to eat, rest, talk, or simply take shelter. In the climate change era, women, elders, and others gather here to escape the intense heat trapped under tin roofs. It is a space shaped by necessity, sustained by memory, and animated by everyday life.

Today, these commons are under threat—what was once a place of refuge has become a source of health risk. Escalating construction in close vicinity has blocked natural drainage with rainwater and waste now accumulating in the graveyard, causing persistent waterlogging, foul smell, and increased risk of disease.

The drains are clogged, sanitation is poor, and the banyan-shaded commons are no longer fit for the life it once sustained. Despite this threat, the graveyard remains an enduring symbol of belonging, resilience, and quiet resistance. It holds both past and present, binding the living to those who came before, and testifying to how amidst harsh urban pressures, people remake space for life.

Yet the city seems unaware of what this place was and is. The evidence is there, visible every afternoon. Those walking along the road adjacent to the colony, en route to the hospital, can see women and children sitting on the footpaths, beneath roadside trees. They sit there not by choice, but because of no other option to escape the heat.

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Water has long been a scarce, precious resource in Gundappa Colony. For years, residents trekked to distant sources or fetched water from adjacent kaluves (natural drainages). The arrival of piped water – thanks to political advocacy—free of cost and within reach is a hard-won victory. This new access drew migrants seeking shelter and opportunity. Unlike many city dwellers whose housing choices hinge on proximity to work or leisure, here, the very availability of water shaped survival and settling choices.

The water supply seems sufficient and enough. But the lived reality tells a deeper story. Women rise before dawn, sometimes as early as 3 a.m., beginning their daily ritual: slowly filling countless containers—small and large—one by one.

This quiet, pre-dawn labor is critical; it secures the day’s water ensuring that work and livelihoods remain uninterrupted.

This is because water doesn’t flow conveniently into individual homes.

Instead, it comes sporadically through communal taps, forcing residents to wait, queue and secure their share. The alleys are occupied by containers filled with water— and in some cases, this precious water reserved containers go into tiny toilets, further highlighting the settlement’s cramped conditions.

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The Cost of Relief Today, many houses in the area have toilets. However, their use faces several challenges. Historically, open defecation was common.

The introduction of public toilets along the main road abutting the settlement and private toilets in several households is a recent phenomenon. However, the colony is not connected to the sewage grid. Most toilets are dependent on soak pits. Given the paucity of space, the soak pits are small and require frequent cleaning – often costing the residents around ₹3,000 every few months. Strong, unpleasant odors that seep into homes from the small underground pits connected to these toilets, hinder the regular usage of them.

Consequently, many of these are left unused, often repurposed as water storage spaces.

Most family members depend on public toilet nearby with a few young girls and pregnant women using the home toilets sparingly during emergency. Notably, access to public toilets. comes at a cost of ₹5 per use.

Bathing practices further highlight this disparity and the intersection of gender and infrastructure access. While men often bathe openly outside, women face greater challenges—they must bathe at odd hours outside or pay to use public toilets for bathing.

What’s basic elsewhere is

life-changing here Waterlogging and flooding during heavy rains are a serious threat in Gundappa Colony. The low-lying areas suffer significant flooding because water from higher parts of the settlement is blocked by construction nearby. The settlement’s drainage system consists of shallow saucer drains that overflow even with a slight increase in domestic water use. As a coping mechanism, residents have made makeshift holes in the formal built fabric abutting the colony to allow for the water to flow. However, these openings are insufficient during heavy rains, and flooding continues to plague the area.

These makeshift coping mechanisms are a message to city planners: infrastructures built without considering the larger systems is bound to fail or cause unintended problems for those it was and wasn’t designed to serve.

The settlement’s infrastructure tells a story of failure and resilience.

Community commons have become solid waste dumps; individual toilets while available are impractical; public toilets demand unaffordable fees. Septic tank cleaning costs are a heavy burden. Houses grow more congested, leaky, and suffocatingly hot. Monsoon flooding forces residents to sleep on cardboard mats to avoid contact with contaminated water, risking snakes and disease.

Cumulatively, these have fueled respiratory illnesses and escalating healthcare costs for a community already stretched thin by laborintensive daily work. Amid these physical and social struggles, residents fight for land rights and recognition—a battle complicated by limited awareness and growing social challenges like rising child marriages and school dropouts.

Yet, through it all, the people of Gundappa Colony endure. Anchored by resilience and driven by hope, they refuse to be invisible, continuously demanding access to tenure security, public services and infrastructure.

“For many communities like Gundappa Colony, these so-called basic infrastructures represent the highest form of privilege they aspire to every day.”

Basic infrastructures are not just about pipes, walls, or service coverage targets. It is fundamentally about valuing people as they are and providing infrastructure that create opportunities, building a social ladder for those pushed to the margins.

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WHITEFIELD But beneath Whitefield’s image of prosperity lies a story of widespread imbalance captured through the process of constitutive communication. It reflects the lived experience of the area’s middle and high-income long-term residents. In contrast to its branded “upmarket” image, the ground reality diverges sharply. For many, the promise of an “upmarket” Whitefield carries a more complex meaning—shaped less by ease and opportunity and more by growing dissatisfaction.

Whitefield, a ward in East Bengaluru, symbolises a larger stretch of the city’s landscape. This symbolic prominence stems from two key factors: its history through the colonial period and its central role in shaping Bengaluru’s contemporary economic identity.

Once a quiet Anglo-Indian settlement (established in 1882) surrounded by villages, Whitefield today is synonymous with the city’s tech-driven growth. It is a site of promise—touted as the gateway to employment, infrastructure, and modernity. Branded as an “upmarket,” landscape associated with premium real estate, luxury products, and an affluent consumer base, its skyline speaks to a transformative shift: glass towers, gated communities, malls, and office parks dominate the view.

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“City, a living, complex organism composed of multiple actors, institutions, and relationships, when reduced to mere land-use maps, zoning, or an economy generating possibility, has farreaching consequences. Such a reductionist approach does not only impact the most vulnerable—as seen earlier from the urban poor’s perspective—it also affects those with a voice and agency. In a whole, it fails the very idea of a city.”

Beneath the Surface of Global Urbanism Where The Trees Were Felled At Night

Middle- and high-income residents of Whitefield speak in tones of loss—of sparrows that once filled their streets, of 70-year-old trees felled quietly at night, of roads perpetually under construction, and of windows once opened to fresh air and sun now kept shut against dust rising from unfinished streets. They speak of neighborhoods they no longer recognize—areas once shaded by dense, mature canopies, now stripped off trees and in places lined with ornamental trees that while aesthetic, do not support biodiversity.

While such expressions may appear nostalgic or can be attributed to an elitist misreading of urban change, in effect these are grounded in a deeper dissatisfaction—one that emerges from the visible and ongoing breakdown of the places’ ecological, social, and infrastructural foundations. Thus, these laments are not merely sentimental.

The transformation that began in the late 1990s intensified in the 2000s was abrupt, disorienting, and disjunctive. Whitefield became the chosen site for a string of economic ‘firsts’: from the early Joy Ice Cream factory (pioneers in the Indian ice cream industry), CONCOR (the country’s first inland container depot), and then, with the arrival of EPIP and ITPL (India’s first IT park), a magnet for India’s globalizing IT sector. Global corporations arrived, land values soared, and speculative capital surged into the area. What did not surge was infrastructural foresight.

Public planning remained less of a concern, reactive, and partial, while real estate markets accelerated beyond any regulatory grasp.

“The result is a landscape caught in an uneven temporality: hypermodern in image, under-equipped in function, and failing in core foundations.”

The failures are not incidental. These are structural, baked into a model of city making that viewed land as a high value commodity.

Water systems, ecological resilience, and existing communities emerged dispensable. Within urban scholarship Whitefield represents what Goldman M (2010) refers to as “speculative urbanism”, a condition where cities are produced through anticipation of capital, rather than through the lived needs of their inhabitants.

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and man-made interventions sustained fertile lands and agricultural production. The maps show one of the densest concentrations of wells across lakes and drainage networks—offering a powerful visual testimony to Whitefield’s agrarian past and its deep entanglement with its water and land.

Longtime residents still recall how farmers once used pristine waters from Varthur Lake to wash fresh produce, for drinking and domestic use directly.

That stands changed now with residents reporting a steep decline in water quality. Though interventions by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) and active citizen groups have helped revive some of the ecological balance, much damage remains and continues.

Whitefield was not just an agriculturally productive region but also a serene retreat, a place to escape the city’s (Bangalore’s) routine.

Revenue records of the seven villages that constitute the presentday Whitefield landscape reveal the once upon a time ecological vibrancy of the area. The landscape presents a dense and intricate hierarchy of a natural drainage system, channeling water from the metropolis toward the Pennar River, flowing along its eastern edge.

The river along with the numerous wells and tanks, supported a robust agricultural economy. The convergence of natural water flow

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Man-made tanks that were once biodiverse commons—Sheelavanthakere, Nellurahalli Pattandur Agrahara I and II —have undergone major transformations. Fast-paced ‘development’ brought massive population inflows, without commensurate infrastructure. Encroachments, pollution, and unchecked construction have left lasting scars. While some of these lakes are biologically functional today (thanks to citizen efforts) in recent times, their social role has changed significantly. In that change there is little clarity on who is included and excluded. These are cumulative indicators of a deeply fractured city making logic that privileged short-term monetary gains over long-term social inhabitability.

Residents observe - apartment buildings around lake boundaries continue to grow taller, and disputes over water quality continue to erupt. When sewage from a broken line seeps into a lake, residents protest. Eventually, a fix is negotiated. But the cycle repeats.

Among these contested lakes, Pattandur Agrahara Tank I stands out—not only for its ecological fragility, but also its historical significance. This 900-year-old man-made lake, dating back to the Chola period faces threats from proposed infrastructure projects, including roads currently under judicial review.

This irony speaks volumes about the priorities of contemporary urban development. In its relentless push for economic growth, the city has overlooked one of the most fundamental foundations of human society: water.

Lakes, once vital systems of survival have been sidelined, treated neither as shared commons nor as essential infrastructure. Their transactional value, as sources of water, has not been the priority; their constitutive role in shaping life, culture, and collective memory has been almost entirely forgotten.

Today, the premium, upmarket neighbourhood is infamous on social media referred to “Waterfield” - where during monsoons residential colonies sink under water, and residents navigate flooded streets in desperation. In summer, water tankers dominate the roads, accidents spike, and tempers flare as groundwater tables plunge to historic lows.

The result is a part of the city that has built over its Rajakaluves (major stormwater drains), lakebeds, and wetlands—and is now struggling to make sense of what is happening as consequence.

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WHITEFIELD

• Outer circle had Anglo-Indian homes with tiled roofs.

• Inner circle served as park and community space.

• 3,900 acres used for AngloIndian farmland cultivation.

• Numerous lakes and ponds supported farming and ecology.

• Varthur Lake sustained agriculture and thriving cultivation landscape.

• Dense rajakaluve network supported drainage and fertile farmlands.

• Kadugodi Plantation—royal gift forming major green cover.

N

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• Inner and outer circles altered for road expansion.

• Outer circle commercial; inner circle now playground.

• Hill leveled; apartments replaced natural greenery.

• Small ponds lost; large lakes encroached or polluted.

• Villages replaced by apartments; limited cultivation remains.

• Lake reduced; park created; biodiversity slowly returning, threatened by encroachment; minimal biodiversity protection.

• Drainage lost; flooding worsened by chaotic urban growth.

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In Whitefield, speculative urbanism is not theory—it is a daily, lived, and felt reality. As the area’s brand value climbed, its livability deteriorated. The community’s emotional vocabulary, its laments, frustrations, and fatigue capture the visceral costs of this speculative logic. These are not grievances in hindsight. Rather these are forwardfacing warnings for the whole city.

Residents refer to Whitefield as a “half-baked cake”—a metaphor that captures the deceptive duality of its transformation: glossy on the surface, yet structurally unsound beneath.

It is a place that was set into motion but abandoned midway. It is an area praised for its economic contribution to Bengaluru, yet one where basic mobility, water security, and ecological stability remain elusive. The mainstream city narrative would celebrate Whitefield as a beacon of global urbanism, however the local experience, reveals a disjointed, poorly mediated growth story.

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“Whitefield’s story may appear—at a distance—to be about roads that don’t work or lakes that no longer breathe. But for those who live through it, the story runs deeper. It reflects the vulnerability and psychic dissonance of being celebrated as the beneficiaries of development, while simultaneously enduring its most destabilizing consequences. It is from these lives that any meaningful act of resilience can begin. Without acknowledging this, the most enduring tragedy will persist: no one will ever understand how it all went wrong—or how it might ever be made whole again.”

07.

FRAMING CLIMATE RESILIENCE, PHOTOVOICE

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The Photovoice - Evidence From Active Citizens The imperative articulated in the previous section is not just about isolated testimonies or impressionistic observations. Additionally, as shown in the methods and process section the study using the method of photovoice as one of its constitutive processes—revealed this scenario in a more quantifiable manner, as presented in the section below.

Photovoice served as a key constitutive method—enabling citizens to document, interpret, and collectively make sense of the city’s evolving challenges. Using the adapted SHOWED framework, the photographs were examined not only what appeared in the photographs, but why these issues persist, what they mean for the city’s resilience, and what deeper systems give rise to them. Through this process, a striking pattern emerged, and it is discussed in the successive section.

S

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What do you See?

H

What is really Happening?

• Begin with observation. What is visible in the image?

• Does the image depict a clear urban issue (e.g., potholes, poor drainage, unmanaged waste) or a climate-related impact (e.g., flooding, heat stress)?

• What visual clues help us categorize it?

• Go beyond appearances. What’s the real story here?

• What did the photographer share (caption)?

What context surrounds the issue?

• Is the issue truly driven by climate change (e.g., intensified rainfall), or by planning and governance failures (e.g., blocked drainage due to unregulated construction)?

This step helps us identify whether the surface issue appears to be “climate” or “urban.”

This is where we begin to interrogate root causes and challenge surface-level assumptions.

O

How does this relate to Our lives?

• Why does this issue matter to urban resident’s resilience?

• Who is most affected — and how?

• What future risks does it pose if left unaddressed?

This step connects the image to lived realities and emphasizes what it means for future resilience.

Using the SHOWED Framework to Analyze Photo-Voice in the Context of Urban Climate Resilience The goal is to understand: • Whether the issue captured in the image reflects climate change impacts, urban governance failures, or a combination of both.

• How these issues are interconnected, and what kind of interventions they demand — whether climate-specific, urban-reform based, or both.

WE

Why does this Exist?

D

What can we Do about it?

• What structural, historical, or governance factors caused this issue?

• Is it a result of: 1. Institutional inaction?

2. Inequitable or top-down planning?

3. Lack of coordination between departments?

4. Or simple due to climate change impact? – ex:increased temperature • What does it say about the way our cities are built and managed?

• What kind of intervention is needed?

1. Is it a climate-focused solution (e.g., heat adaptation)?

2. Or does it require urban reforms (e.g., better waste management, localized infrastructure planning)?

• Are there sectoral actions (e.g., housing, sanitation, mobility)?

• Can we think of long-term transformations that address both urban and climate resilience together?

This is the constitutive layer — where we surface the systemic “wickedness” behind what we see.

This step turns insight into action — both immediate and systemic.

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The Photo-Voice Climate Change Is the Problem! But Are Climate Solutions Alone Enough?

3. Public Infrastructure construction workers

“With increasing migration to cities like Bengaluru, thousands

of men and women take up construction work as a primary livelihood. The migrant workers often from rural or climate stressed region live in temporary settlements near work sites and face harsh unsafe conditions. Construction work is physically intensive and mostly outdoors, exposing workers to extreme heat, dust and other erratic weather patterns. All of them are getting worsened due to climate change.

[S]

SEE – Climate Change Impact (C)

[H]

HAPPENING - Climate Change Impact and Distressed Urban Migration (C & U)

[O]

For OUR climate resilience – High importance (CCC) WHY EXISTS – Lack of Climate sensitive development and

[WE] Unequal development priorities (C & U) [D] 68

DO – Enable Climate Sensitive development and focus on equal development in urban and rural areas (C & U)

Rising temperatures and unpredictable rains have made daily survival more difficult in Bengaluru. While both men and women are impacted, the burden on the women is greater, they are often paid less but also involve in heavy manual labour. And they still shoulder caregiving and household duties. Many works without access to toilet, drinking water and proper safety gear.

As cities like Bengaluru grow, and climate change impact intensifies, there is an urgent need to recognise the vulnerabilities of migrant construction workers and design more inclusive, gender sensitive and climate resilient urban development strategies.”

Urban Governance is the Base for Climate Resilience 1. KR Puram Metro Station

1. Annasandra Palya

“There was a time in the city when

heat slipped in and out without being noticed, quiet, and almost polite. Now it stays like an uninvited guest, heavy and relentless. Still invisible but deeply personal in how it clings to each of us.”

Here is my friend Shilpa, an explorer at heart, a runner, a cyclist waiting at KR Pura station. Her face says what words can’t - this is what our city feels like now.

“This shows how vacant plots/sites are used as garbage dumps

attracting cows and dogs. We must have a regulation to demand that. ”

[S]

SEE – Urban Governance Issue (U)

[S]

SEE – Climate Change Impact (C)

[H]

HAPPENING – Urban Governance Issue (U)

[H]

HAPPENING - Climate Change Impact (C)

[O]

[O]

For OUR climate resilience – High importance (CCC)

For OUR climate resilience – Medium importance. During heavy rains, accumulated waste blocks stormwater drains, increases flooding risks, and contributes to vector-borne diseases. (CC)

WHY EXISTS – Lack of Climate sensitive development (C)

[WE]

WHY EXISTS – Lack of effective local governance and accountability. (U)

DO – Enable Climate Sensitive development (C)

[D]

DO – Strengthen and enable local governance mechanisms (U)

[WE] [D]

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3. GVKV road, Rajiv Ghandhi Nagar

4. Dairy Circle Underpass

“These are pictures taken under

“It deeply bothers me to see the growing amount of plastic waste being carelessly thrown around our city. What is most concerning is the continued littering. Why are we allowing this to happen? This particular stretch is a common path used by many of us, including children on their way to school. And yet every day we greeted by a pile of garbage that only seems to be growing. The stench is unbearable at times. It gets so bad that we have to cover our noses just to pass through. It’s not just unpleasant, its unhealthy. Once this garbage is dumped

the Dairy circle Underpass. The litter you see is not just garbage but leftovers of a slaughtered animal, bottles etc. This is the third day and the animal flesh is still all over the road and Stinks badly.

There are no residences nearby and some people are using this place to dump harmful waste.

There is a waste segregation unit close by. It hurts me to see a nice place going to ruin like this”

it rarely gets picked up, turning into a permanent breeding ground for more waste.

And yet we aren’t lacking in waste collection services. Our Pourakarmikas are doing their part. What is missing is our effort, we each need to take responsibility, reduce plastic, segregate our waste and hand it over to the Pourakarmikas. These are simple actions but together it can lead to a real change”

[S]

SEE - Urban Governance Issue (U)

[S]

SEE - Urban Governance Issue (U)

[H]

HAPPENING – Urban governance Issues and citizen awareness.

(U)

[H]

[O]

For OUR climate resilience - Medium importance. Unmanaged waste contributes to pollution, health risks, and flooding during rain. (CC)

HAPPENING - Illegal waste dumping and neglect of public spaces, despite nearby waste facilities, revealing poor monitoring and lack of accountability. (U)

[O]

For OUR climate resilience: Medium importance. unmanaged organic waste contributes to pollution, odour, health hazards.

(CC)

[WE] WHY EXISTS - Lack of accountability, and poor public awareness.

(U)

[D] 70

DO - Strengthen local governance mechanisms and promote citizen-led waste reduction and segregation practices as part of everyday urban responsibility. (U)

[WE] WHY EXISTS: Lack of accountability, and poor public awareness. (U)

[D]

DO: Strengthen urban governance and community monitoring. (U)

Urban Planning and Governance: Two Sides of the Same Key for Climate Resilience 1. TC Palya

2. Rajiv Ghandhi Nagar, KR Puram

3. B Narayanapura

“This is an open

“This is on the

main road in TC Palya from Vinayak Nagar to Ramamurthy Nagar Road.

There is Sewage overflowing through the manhole. ”

“This is the road

leading to B Narayanapura in bad dis-repair conditions. The overflowing drainage cause problems for pedestrians and vehicles”

sewage manhole on the main road in Rajiv Gandhi Nagar. A small piece of asbestos has been placed on it, but it is insufficient and unsafe, posing a serious danger to vehicles during rain in the nights ”

[S]

SEE - Urban Planning Issue (U)

[S]

SEE – Urban Governance issue (U)

[S]

SEE – Urban Planning Issue (U)

[H]

HAPPENING – Urban Planning Issue.

(U)

[H]

HAPPENING – Urban Governance issue (U)

[H]

HAPPENING – Urban Governance issue (U)

[O]

For OUR climate resilience - High importance. (CCC)

[O]

[O]

[WE]

WHY EXISTS - Lack of governance and accountability, and Lack of Planning. (U)

For OUR climate resilience – Medium importance. Poor Urban governance, exacerbating climate risks. (CC)

For OUR climate resilience – Medium importance. Poor Urban governance, exacerbating climate risks. (CC)

[WE]

WHY EXISTS – Lack of local governance and accountability (U)

[WE]

WHY EXISTS – Lack of local governance and accountability (U)

[D]

DO - Strengthen urban local governance and making planning process accountable. (U)

[D]

DO – Strengthen urban governance (U)

[D]

DO – Strengthen Urban governance (U)

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Seems like a Climate Problem! But the Solution is Not Just Climate Intervention or Technical Urban Fixes!

1. GVKV road, Rajiv Ghandhi Nagar

2. Gundappa colony

“I’m Aruna from Gundappa colony.

The reason for uploading this picture is to show our difficulty due to poor drainage. There is no proper drainage to let the water flow, and it also collects near the drinking water taps and causes breeding of mosquitoes and other insects causing sickness to people. When it rains for even a few minutes, all this water floods into our homes bringing garbage and plastics, Inside our homes the water will be ankle deep ”

“Hello, my name is Gangaraj. We live in a slum in T.C. Palya in Vinayaka

Nagar. We are 35 families who are a group of hair pickers residing next to a storm drain (Raja Kaluve). Ours is a low-lying area and when it rains, the storm water drain overflows in our houses soaking everything. Our grains and food, our bedding, everything. The drainage water also brings everything - snakes and scorpions into our houses. This water does not recede for 7 - 8 days. We can’t cook or eat or live here. The children can’t study and they will fall sick. The MLA and our corporator have not helped even after repeated requests ”

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[S]

SEE – Climate change effect (C)

[H]

HAPPENING – Poor Urban Housing and environment planning (U)

[O]

For OUR climate resilience – High importance (CCC)

[WE]

WHY EXISTS – Non-Inclusive Urban Developmental priorities (U)

[D]

DO – Social justice as the principle of urban and climate resilience (U)

[S]

SEE – Climate change effect (C)

[H]

HAPPENING – Poor Urban Housing and drainage planning (U)

[O]

For OUR climate resilience – High importance (CCC)

[WE]

WHY EXISTS – Non-Inclusive Urban Developmental priorities (U)

[D]

DO – Social justice as the principle of urban and climate resilience (U)

Many problems that citizens initially described as “climate issues” were, at their core, failures embedded in the everyday urban civic functions: waste management breakdowns, poor infrastructure maintenance, disappearing greens and blues, and more broadly absence of urban governance. Conversely, several photographs that appeared to portray routine urban dysfunction revealed after analysis that they have a direct and significant implications for climate resilience. In other words, the boundary between “urban problem” and “climate problem” proved deeply porous.

Understanding these issues in their constitutive form—as problems produced by systemic weaknesses rather than isolated incidents—is critical. Residents repeatedly pointed to governance failures: unclear accountability, fragmented institutions, weak enforcement, and planning processes disconnected from lived realities. These are not new findings; national and global6 reports have long underscored governance reform as central to climate-ready cities. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ Pathways for Mainstreaming Urban Climate Actions (2025) reiterates this emphasis. Yet, progress remains limited, and the gap between policy intention and on-ground transformation continues to widen.

For formal and professional city-makers, cultivating constitutive communication becomes essential. It demands listening not merely to extract “community inputs” (as a method), but to genuinely understand how residents interpret breakdowns, negotiate everyday vulnerabilities, and articulate priorities (as a lens). This is where the city’s most relevant knowledge lies. Ignoring it risks repeating past mistakes; embracing it opens pathways to addressing the wicked, interconnected problems that underpin both urban and climate risk.

The Photovoice exercise makes one thing clear: citizens have long identified the systemic issues that hinder resilience. Unless the city making institutions learn to recognize, interpret, and act upon these constitutive signals, the city will continue to chase symptoms while leaving root causes untouched. Only by addressing these deeper failures can Bengaluru and its neighborhoods like Whitefield begin to rebuild resilience in ways that are meaningful, equitable, and enduring.

The Photovoice and the overall study’s findings reaffirm the crucial insight: without addressing foundational governance and systemic failures, urban climate resilience efforts will remain superficial.

Technical fixes, climate-specific interventions, and pilot projects cannot succeed when the enabling environment is fractured. What is needed is a shift in how city-making is approached—seeing it not as a sequence of discrete, sectoral interventions, but as a process rooted in people and communicative action.

6 The IPCC AR6 (Cities, Settlements, and Key Infrastructure) highlights that overcoming institutional barriers—insufficient finance, limited human capacity, weak political commitment, fragmented institutions, and unclear responsibilities— is essential for creating the enabling conditions required for effective climate adaptation.

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Framing Climate Resilience in [Indian] Cities This research evidenced how city making, and its governance is critical to how climate change impacts are experienced and intensified in urban contexts. In other words, the research evidenced the inextricable experience of the urban and changing climates - as informed by the constitutive communication approach. In doing so, the research did not merely restate the persistent urban challenges and or offer yet another critique amongst the many. Rather, it highlights the risk of maladaptation or inaction if Indian cities—under the mounting pressures of climate crises—fail to address these challenges in their constitutive forms rather than through abstract framings.

Creating consistent and constitutive pathways of designing communication to enable the foregrounding of grounded knowledge and lived experiences to inform formal planning systems is an emerging imperative. So far city-making processes have remained largely unresponsive to these known complexities. One of the critical risks identified is the disconnect between global climate imperatives and local planning responses. In recent years, cities large and small have started gaining momentum in advancing climate action, driven by global and national pressure to treat climate change not only as an environmental concern but as a fundamental challenge to human society.

Several Indian cities have developed Climate Action Plans (CAPs), even though there is no statutory mandate for them to do. These local efforts are paralleled by national commitments such as the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the National Adaptation Plan, both aligned with the international mandates of the Paris Agreement.

While these frameworks are broad and ambitious, aiming for longterm resilience, they often fall short in translating the

Singh, Chandini et al. (2021), in their analysis of 53 Indian cities and their city plan for climate adaptation, highlight this issue with considerable nuance. Cities face multiple challenges regarding climate action: which actions to prioritize, how to implement them, at what scale and speed, and who is included or excluded in these decisions.

The adaptation efforts analyzed often remain project-based and reactive, which, when coupled with inadequate long-term planning, are warned to potentially lead to maladaptive outcomes. (Singh, Madhavan, Arvind, & Bazaz, 2021)(Singh, Madhavan, Arvind, & Bazaz, 2021) Climate action efforts take on a transactional and technocratic form. For instance, vulnerability mapping has become a standard component of CAPs. While this tool provides useful, scalable insights, it often emerges an end in itself. It fails to capture the full complexity of who is vulnerable, how they are affected, and in what specific contexts. In doing so, these plans risk reproducing the same topdown, centralized – one size fits all approaches that have historically characterized urban development and governance in India (Integrated Design, 2025).

A critical imperative highlighted in the World Cities Report 2025 is the need to move beyond generalized notions of vulnerability and instead focus on detailed, localized analyses.

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normative constitutive values embedded in global climate agendas— particularly those concerning climate justice and human rights—into meaningful local action.

To move forward meaningfully, national and city-level climate policies must not only advance in its purpose, but also evolve in method.

This means connecting generalized frameworks and embracing hyperlocal, context-sensitive systems to enable resilience. Without such a shift, even the most well-intentioned climate strategies may remain superficial and disconnected from the everyday realities of the communities they are meant to serve.

Local authorities, burdened with legally mandated civic responsibilities, are unlikely to prioritize or understand frameworks that frame a ward plan solely in the language of climate change. If the plan is couched only in climate-centric terminology—talking about impacts and adaptation strategies—it risks being ignored or sidelined, not due to unwillingness, but due to a misalignment with institutional responsibilities and everyday governance priorities. Therefore, climate action efforts that do not engage with the constitutive nature Although climate change frameworks often encompass urban of urban problems—or the underlying systems that shape local challenges under their broader mandate, simply treating urban issues vulnerabilities—risk inaction. The officials concern was precisely this: as a subset of climate impact risks oversimplifying both. This approach if a plan is framed explicitly and solely around abstract climate action, can result in ineffective solutions—either as maladaptation from a it may not resonate with local authorities who are more immediately climate perspective or as a reproduction of existing urban dysfunctions accountable to action at local level. In her view, avoiding inaction from a planning perspective. The following observation by a municipal required aligning climate action planning efforts with the practical official captures this challenge adequately. and institutional realities of local governance, not with abstract global agendas.

“I know that it is important to prepare a ward scale To avoid maladaptation, it is critical to recognizing that the primary climate action plan [as an extension of the City’s driver of vulnerability is not climate change in isolation, but the structural wickedness of urban systems.

Climate Action Plan]. However, if I tell my people [the government officials] that this is from a climate perspective, there is hesitation to take it on. Let’s frame it as an urban development plan or a local area plan at the ward scale. I don’t know why, they are never enthusiastic when we frame it as climate action” (Official, Municipal Climate Action Cell)

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08.

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THE BIG QUESTION— ENABLING CONSTITUTIVE COMMUNICATION IN THE CITY MAKING

The Big question— Enabling Constitutive Communication in the City Making Cities are not shaped solely by formal planning or infrastructure; they emerge from everyday interactions, negotiations, and the shared struggles of those who inhabit them. As illustrated in this research, several aspects of a city’s localized challenges often remain invisible or overlooked. To truly understand urban complexity, multiple data points must be considered. In this research, the highlight the importance of adopting a constitutive perspective—one rooted in the lived experiences of diverse communities—is essential. The dominant transactional, top-down approaches while helping cities in meeting procedural benchmarks or global competitiveness indices, often fail to capture the social, cultural, and human dimensions of urban life.

At the heart of enabling a constitutive city-making process is the need to strengthen the capacity, and political empowerment of local, institutionalized governance actors. This is critical to understanding the whole system as well as the interactions between the parts of the system. While higher-level authorities hold significant political power, local representatives—who witness the city’s realities every day—often lack the empowerment to advocate for and actively shape its future. Constitutive communication without decentralized political empowerment is insufficient; the two must go hand in hand, as local engagement is essential for meaningful city-making. This urgency is particularly acute in India, where decentralization is constitutionally mandated but often neglected in practice.

Lessons from Purnia’s School: The Problem of Missing Local Political Empowerment Yamini Aiyar, a leading policy scholar at the Centre for Policy Research, provides a compelling example of the consequences of this neglect. Her 2012–2013 research on public policy expenditure tracking highlights the disconnect that can arise between policy intent and local realities, offering a critical perspective for understanding the relationship climate and urban challenges facing Indian cities. Following a tragic fire in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, where schoolchildren died due to a kitchen fire (used for the mid-day meal programme), the Union government issued a nationwide directive requiring all government schools to install emergency fire extinguishers. In Purnia, Bihar, a school functioning under a tree—no building, just teachers, students, blackboards, and chalks force to comply with this directive acted thus. It used a part of the School Development Grant, which prescribes how money is to be spent (e.g., on chalk, blackboards, fire extinguishers, etc.) to buy a fire extinguisher. Given that there was no realistic possibility of a fire in a school operating under a tree, the school bought the extinguisher to simply to comply with the directive and submit the required utilization certificate, without which future funding would be uncertain.

The problem wasn’t the intent behind the central directive, which was rooted in a legitimate concern for student safety. Rather, it was the lack of local discretion to adapt this directive to the specific context. As Aiyar points out, a district collector cannot be expected to oversee and work on such granular, ground-level decisions across hundreds of schools. But a politically empowered panchayat could have intervened—redirecting the funds toward more pressing needs: books, temporary seating, or a part-time teacher for remedial support.

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This case highlights how the absence of local political empowerment leads not only to inefficiencies in functions and misallocated resources but also to conditions ripe for corruption. When centralized accountability systems rely solely on transactional communication, resultant action is all about compliance and documentation.

Democratic accountability (pre-requisites for constitutive value based actions), where people can question and shape decisions is near absent. Performative governance as against governance for and by the people becomes the norm.

More broadly, this reflects a vicious cycle: top-down accountability mechanisms without corresponding bottom-up political empowerment reproduce dysfunction. For governance to be truly effective, higher levels must set broad visions, standards, and frameworks—while local governments must be trusted and equipped to implement them contextually. For example: in this case, tasks like ensuring teacher attendance, monitoring learning outcomes, or managing micro-infrastructure cannot be effectively done from above. When local political accountable actors lack real authority, these responsibilities either go unmet or are gamed through variety of loopholes.

In the context of municipal water supply, a valve operator—who possess detailed, ground-level knowledge—can play a crucial role in enhancing urban water security. Similarly, CAPs developed at the municipal level are effective only when informed by local conditions and realities. The first layer of this localized knowledge and accountability for climate action rests with ward councillors and members, who are directly answerable to their communities. These are the subsidiary needs that many policies, including climate action policies, often fail to recognize.

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The constitutive meaning of any policy or intervention shifts as it moves from top to local levels. Ignoring this shift—by enforcing uniform directives without enabling local discretion—risks triggering cycles of inefficient outcome, exclusion, and public disillusionment. In the context of city-making, such disconnects reinforce what is already called and seen as ‘urban wickedness’—a condition where cities begin to functionally disintegrate, failing in their most basic responsibility: to serve their residents. Not just the minorities, but also the majorities; not only those at the margins, but equally those at the center.

09.

CONSTITUTIVE COMMUNICATION AND THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE-RESILIENT CITIES

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Constitutive Communication and the Future of Climate-Resilient Cities The relationship between the city and communication—at least within non-mainstream approaches to city-making such as grassroots initiatives and participatory planning—is not new. While participatory models are often presented as innovative or alternative frameworks for urban development, the very essence of urban life has always been rooted in human communication. From their earliest forms, cities have existed as spaces of shared meaning, collective action, and mutual dependence. A city, in its truest sense, is a manifestation of common wealth and shared possibilities; and communication, at its core, is the act of making things common.

Seen through this lens, communication—and more specifically, constitutive communication—is not an aspirational or supplementary feature of better city-making.

It is the very foundation that allows a city to function as a living, evolving organism. Recognizing this reality calls on all actors involved in shaping cities—planners, policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and communities—to engage with communication as an essential, not optional, process. Valuing this communicative foundation opens the possibility for cities to become more resilient, inclusive, and responsive to the people they serve.

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Building climate-resilient cities, therefore, requires more than technocratic fixes or policy alignment. It demands a reorientation of governance and planning practices toward grounded understanding, shared dialogue, and mutual meaning-making. Constitutive communication offers this pathway—by bridging formal systems with lived realities, enabling local empowerment, and translating complexity into actionable understanding.

Without such a shift, climate action risks remaining performative— focused on compliance rather than transformation—and may reproduce the same systemic failures that created vulnerability in the first place. Constitutive communication does not claim to solve these “wicked problems” outright; rather, it represents a slow but decisive move toward city-making that is context-sensitive, participatory, and reflexive. A fully “constitutive city” may not yet be attainable, but striving toward it offers a powerful direction for the future. It reminds that resilience is not merely about infrastructure or adaptation plans— it is about creating systems that can listen, learn, and evolve with their people. In doing so, the city becomes not only a site of climate action, but also a space of shared meaning, justice, and enduring collective resilience.

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Acknowledgment SATTVA Trust and Integrated Design acknowledge the contribution of varying researchers and collaborators who contributed to this research and to the curation of this report.

Guided by Dr. Anjali Karol Mohan, the team contributed meaningfully throughout the process. J Justin Andrews worked closely across all stages of the research, from data collection and analysis to the curation of final findings and outcomes; Shruti Kulkarni designed the report and developed illustrations that captured the nuances of the findings; Vanessa Quadros documented select primary engagements with children and youth during her interning. In addition, we acknowledge inputs by Janani S, and Sharanya S. We thank the Association for Promoting Social Action (APSA) for their expertise in facilitating community engagement and the Photovoice exercise, leveraging their long-standing commitment to local slum communities developed through years of social development work. In particular, we acknowledge the efforts of Neeth D’Souza and APSA’s field team, including Manjula N., Suresh Kantha, and Anitha Prakash Rao. We acknowledge the contributions of Whitefield Rising, Gubbi Labs, India Literacy Programme, RV University, and CMR University, whose involvement at various stages enriched stakeholder interactions and strengthened the overall research outcomes.

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Finally, we are deeply grateful to all individuals who shared their experiences with openness, enthusiasm, and hope for change, including communities in urban poor settlements, apartment residents, citizen groups, people in public spaces, schoolchildren, and college youth across Bengaluru. Their support and contributions lie at the core of this work.

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