Imagining Bangalore: A collaborative photo-journalism project

Abstract

We the students of IIM Bangalore stay in the third most populous city of India also known as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’. There is so much to Bangalore than its metropolitan crowd, be its hub of well recognized educational and research institutions, the Kannada Film Industry or its rich medieval history. The city covers an area of 781 km2 nearly, of which the majority lies in the Bangalore Urban district. Our project is part of the larger work the primary objective of which is to capture the essence of Bangalore. The project builds on a sampling frame that was developed as part of what is arguably the biggest data collection in the urban water sector (www.urbanmetabolism.in). With alignment to our scope of coverage we have visited three areas, Manasa Nagara, HMT Ward and Ullalu to understand the various aspects of these parts of the city. We conducted informal interviews with the residents (7-8 families) of these localities on their lives, about the history of the locality, the changes that have occurred in through the years to the existence of the locality, etc. We have captured the personal histories of the residents and documented the chosen areas from the perspective of the residents in those areas. To support our work further, we have captured some photographs of the various public services, landscape, and buildings of these areas.