Welcome back to Bengaluru, the Garden City!
My previous post on Bengaluru related how we successfully accomplished the adaptation of our fieldwork design, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, I say welcome back to the garden city, to share our research findings with you.
Bengaluru is celebrated for its green infrastructure. Iconic trees grace its streets, avenues, domestic gardens, farms, sacred places, and public parks (such as the Lalbagh in Fig. 1). But these trees are increasingly at risk of loss due to urban expansion (Sudhira & Nagendra 2013).
Once well-known as the ‘Garden city of India’, Bengaluru is now a growing IT hub, and often referred to as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’.
The availability of more and more IT and other jobs and facilities, e.g., health & education, housing, and transportation, attract people from surrounding rural areas to work and fulfill their dreams in Bengaluru. Thus, population density of the city has more than doubled in two decades from 7,881 persons/sq. km in 2001 to 19,180 persons/sq. km in 2023.
As the city grows, undeveloped land (as seen in Fig. 2), is becoming scarcer. Green infrastructure gets less priority when it comes to maintaining and protecting existing areas or to establishing and creating new green spaces. The amount of green infrastructure declines in consequence (Bhaskar et al. 2022).
With this in mind, our research aimed to explore the importance of small-scale green infrastructure in urbanizing contexts and its relevance to local communities.
Specifically, we wanted to understand which benefits and harms were important to different people, and to which types of trees these benefits and harms were linked.
We also wanted to learn how the benefits and harms differed across rural, urban, and transitional areas. And finally, we wondered how different socio-economic factors such as respondents’ gender, age, education level, caste, and having income from agriculture affected their views.
Images were used in the survey to discuss benefits and harms from small-scale green infrastructure
During our photo elicitation survey we referred to the five most common types of small-scale green infrastructure namely domestic trees, farm trees, street trees, temple trees, and platform trees (Fig. 3).
Local people and local researchers who have long experience of doing research on green infrastructure suggested us to include these tree types in our research.
We showed printed A4 sized photos of these trees to locals and asked them to rank the importance of benefits and harms linked to these trees on a scale from 1 (least important) to 5 (most important).
Domestic trees — such as mango (Mangifera indica) and moringa (Moringa oleifera) trees or coconut palms (Cocos nucifera) — are found in home gardens and private spaces near homes. Farm trees are situated in the margins of farms — a private space. Street trees — including tamarinds (Tamarindus sp.) and rain trees (Albizia saman) with their very fine pink flowers — are located in public avenues. Temple trees are typically found on the periphery of temples. Platform trees are found in (informal) community-managed platforms, used for worship, and associated with serpentine idols (Fig. 4) — figures in the shape of full or partial snake bodies. In Hinduism, snakes are considered and worshiped as symbols of birth, rebirth, and death because they shed their skins. This skin shedding is often considered as rebirth.
The study was conducted along a rural-urban gradient (as shown in Fig. 5) to understand how the importance of such trees varies along the rural-urban gradient.
In practical terms, there is no exact point of place that demarcates rural from urban areas. Rather there is a gradual increase or decrease of ‘rurality’ or ‘urbanity’, which we call a rural-urban gradient.
By the end of our fieldwork, we had surveyed 649 people from 61 towns of Bengaluru, stretching from the inner city to its rural periphery.
What did we find out?
Climate regulation and natural beauty mattered most to people
Among all the benefits, people gave highest importance to air/climate regulation and to natural beauty.
With global warming, cities are hard hit by increasing temperatures and often times by heat waves in Bengaluru. Climate regulation from trees is perceived as a key benefit for the people in Bengaluru.
As cities nowadays are mostly urban jungles of grey buildings and other built-up infrastructure, having some trees are considered very important to preserve the natural beauty of the city.
People valued trees in private spaces more than trees in public spaces
We found that people related more benefits and harms from trees in private spaces, such as from farm and domestic trees, than from street and platform trees in public spaces.
People valued material benefits — such as food, ornamental flowers, and medicinal resources — from farm and domestic trees more.
They also valued these tree types for their regulating benefits, for example, their contribution to air/climate regulation and soil improvement. Material benefits from street, temple, and platform trees were relatively less important. People gave the highest importance to cultural benefits from temple trees such as spirituality, followed by domestic trees. However, farm trees and temple trees were also the most important sources of harms. Damage to crops from tree-living animals, such as monkey, is one example.
People related more benefits from trees in transitional areas
In general, people associated more benefits with trees in transitional areas than those in urban and rural areas. They ranked material and regulating benefits as outstanding, in transitional areas. Especially food and air/climate regulation were important.
In transitional areas — in contrast to urban and rural areas — farm trees were found to be most important in terms of providing food and regulating air. In transitional areas, aesthetic values of farm trees and and spiritual values of temple trees were rated higher than in rural areas.
Harms, such as crop damage caused by tree-living monkeys or threats posed by snakes, living around domestic trees in rural areas, were higher than in transitional and urban areas.
Harms associated with urban street trees were lower than those linked to rural street trees.
People’s socio-economic background affected their benefits from trees
People’s perception of trees and their associated benefits in Bengaluru varied, based on their socio-economic background. We found that benefits such as climate, soil, and water regulation by the trees were more important for men than for women. Elderly people valued cultural benefits, e.g., social interactions, spirituality, natural beauty, and attachment with place more than younger people did.
Highly educated people valued material benefits such as food and feed, ornamental flowers, wood, and medicinal values more than people with lower levels of education.
People from marginalized caste groups valued material benefits more than other castes. Harms, such as crop damage by tree-living animals or birds, dangerous animals, and nuisances such as dumping waste, taking drugs or drinking alcohol around trees were valued similarly by everyone.
Key takeaways
With rapid urbanization, patterns in the valuation of benefits and harms from small-scale green infrastructure are changing. People tend to value regulating and cultural benefits, such as air cooling, water purification, and natural beauty, more than before. People in transitional areas still assign high importance to material benefits such as food and medicinal resources from green infrastructure. However, we also observed slums in urban areas, where people highly valued food and medicinal resources from trees (Nagendra et al. 2013). Marginalized communities, e.g., tribal people also mostly valued medicinal resources. They even domesticated some of the street and temple trees, for easier access. Harms were not very important to people — though harms exist — mostly in rural areas.
The most important takeaway from our research is that multiple benefits from small-scale green infrastructure should be appreciated and recognized in local policies, so that the diverse benefits of tress can be equitably promoted and harms to communities can be minimized.
Further reading
This blogpost is based on a research article: Thapa, P., Torralba, M., Bhaskar, D., Nagendra, H., & Plieninger, T. (2023). Green in grey: ecosystem services and disservices perceptions from small-scale green infrastructure along a rural-urban gradient in Bengaluru, India. Ecosystems and People, 19(1), 2223307. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2023.2223307
An earlier blogpost (2021) on the fieldwork behind this research can be read at: https://medium.com/people-nature-landscapes/remote-social-ecological-fieldwork-in-urban-landscapes-tracing-green-infrastructure-in-bengaluru-9c2fd7c89d1
Bhaskar, D., Harini, K. S., & Chetan, H. C. (2022). Changing People-Nature Linkages Around Green Infrastructure in Rapidly Urbanising Landscapes: The Case of a protected area in Bengaluru Metropolitan Region of South India. In Blue-Green Infrastructure Across Asian Countries: Improving Urban Resilience and Sustainability (pp. 271–292). Singapore: Springer Singapore
Nagendra, H., Unnikrishnan, H., & Sen, S. (2013). Villages in the city: spatial and temporal heterogeneity in rurality and urbanity in Bangalore, India. Land, 3(1), 1–18.
Sudhira, H. S., & Nagendra, H. (2013). Local assessment of Bangalore: graying and greening in Bangalore–impacts of urbanization on ecosystems, ecosystem services and biodiversity. Urbanization, biodiversity and ecosystem services: Challenges and opportunities: A global assessment, 75–91.
