What does it take to act locally?
Solving for Non-motorized Transport ground-up
In the last few years, there has been a lot of global resonance around the idea that achieving sustainable development (SDG) is only possible through the power of local action. The UN calls this (2020–2030) the ‘Decade of Action’. Particularly post Covid, there has been a slew of inspiring new initiatives across India to promote non-motorised transport through cycling and walking as one of the ways to achieve sustainable cities. This includes national programmes such as ‘Cycles 4 Change Challenge’ and ‘Streets for people’, amongst other initiatives.
This collective push has led to increased promotion and support for community-led local projects across different cities. These early efforts are highly consequential because the methods and learnings from these few cities will set a precedent for action in numerous other cities that strive for similar initiatives.
What distinguishes local projects from mainstream infrastructure development is that they are anchored by local community groups that are end users and so bring experience and knowledge about the context and needs of the place. Hence intrinsically, there is high ownership, adoption and ‘fit’. Such projects are also generally smaller with less complications, making them easier and faster to execute. In most cases they also offer the context and unit size conducive for replication.
Yet, some of the big questions that revolve around making local projects include:
- Do citizens really have the capacity to do local projects?
- Will involving people directly as decision makers not lead to more opposition and slower action?
- What is the role of the government in supporting community projects?
In this article, we share insights from 2 of our neighbourhood level projects from Bengaluru — a project to encourage walking in the historic neighbourhood of Malleswaram, designing complete streets for walking and cycling to enable first and last mile connectivity in Doddanekundi. Through these insights we have established 5 key ingredients that we have found to be critical in enabling local projects — funding, data, civic engagement and partnership, technical support and conflict resolution.
# 1 | Building local databases with local residents is integral to enabling informed decision making and grounded projects
Local projects are often conceived by a handful of active citizens or officials where the tendency is to base them on their personal experiences or perspectives. While data to root local action is generally inadequate or missing. Even when the diagnosis of an issue is in the right direction, there is a lack of evidence to form a consensus between diverse stakeholders. As a result, the solutions generally fall short in addressing causal factors, as well as in incorporating all the components and optimising impact from the limited budgets.
Building local databases with citizens that are end-users can help provide the most insightful and representative bottom-up information to capture the status quo.
Further, the process of citizen involvement also has co-benefits in increasing local understanding of on-ground realities and, thus, the ownership and partnership for change. At the same time, it is also a sure-short way to augment the capacity to undertake cumbersome exercises like on-ground audits and data collection.
In the Walkable Malleswaram project, local databases created included the following:
- travel pattern data of Malleswaram residents was captured via origin-destination surveys
- Vision surveys with citizens led to quantifying preferred modes of transport and their barriers
- Citizen-led audits of footpaths and conservancies helped in creating an accurate and comprehensive geospatial map and documentation of over 100 issues across the neighbourhood.
A similar exercise in Doddanekundi particularly brought focus to the number of utilitarian cyclist, especially women, capturing their challenges. Many women cyclists also participated in the handlebar survey conducted to map issues along the proposed cycling network.
#2 | Formal (funded) avenues need to be created to enable the involvement of professionals in community-based projects
While community groups are essential to bringing the local user perspective and reality check, they have limitations in terms of the time they can volunteer towards civic projects and the specific domain knowledge they inherently possess. When coupled with the capacity deficit within government agencies, projects’ progress is often intermittent. Further, in many cases, the loss of momentum also results in the de-prioritisation, putting projects in limbo for years.
Professionals and domain experts can add significant and specific value to community-based projects. Applying their knowledge and with similar projects/processes can help community groups drastically reduce the time, effort, and hurdles along the way.
Professionals can also play an integral role within community project teams as sounding boards to address crucial points of breakdown. In addition, they can offer a more objective lens and make projects more comprehensive in different aspects. Lastly, enabling young professionals, in particular, is a sure way to expand the ecosystem of change-makers and augment the city’s capacity to realise many more projects and initiatives.
For example, Sensing Local is the technical partner for two communities in Malleswaram and Doddanekundi under the SuMA projects. It has only been made possible with the support of external philanthropic grants. A team of 3 to 4 professionals have driven the project over the last year and four months, including sustaining the momentum despite implementation delays. In terms of budgets, the team has channeled over 60+ crores so far from the government (SuMA and BBMP) and private sources, with the staffing cost equating to only 4–5% of the total amount.
Overall, there are three key areas for the contribution of professionals within community projects.
- Bringing technical expertise in strategy, planning and design
- Maximising public participation and ensuring inclusivity and representation through all stages of the project
- Providing project management and implementation support
#3 | Citizen participation requires curated engagement to be representative and inclusive
Invariably most community-based projects are led by 2–3 active citizens. It is a function of a mix of need, passion, and privilege that dictates who can contribute their time towards the required daily and weekly hours. However, ensuring a local project is inclusive and caters to all the different issues requires deeper engagement across all the various stakeholders in a given place. In the absence of a legacy of citizen participation and feedback in public projects, people also need to be empowered to engage meaningfully.
The projects in Malleswaram, Doddanekundi and Banaswadi demonstrate different ways of curating citizen participation exercises, where the underlying approach is the following:
- Listen to citizen voices on their terms.
- Utilise meaningful and interactive modes of engagement suited for different stakeholder groups.
- Create a larger sense of community/collective context for more like-minded people to discover each other and find a shared purpose.
Lastly, citizen participatory efforts in creating local projects have other co-benefits, such as providing impetus for like-minded residents to come together around shared issues to form a community. It is essential and consequential in harnessing local support and resources for local projects and maintaining the upgraded places over time.
#4 | Even local projects require a plan to align stakeholders, channel funding and create ownership
Community efforts to improve the quality of their neighbourhoods primarily tend to present themselves in two forms. They are either spot fixes, like repairing a slight stretch of a footpath, clearing a garbage black spot, or relating to systemic challenges like traffic congestion or sewage in rajakaluves. However, since the geography of concern is generally defined for local communities, solutions mainly address symptoms and not the causal factors.
Solving infrastructure issues can often be complex because of the myriad of considerations. They also involve multiple government agencies for planning and implementation, and invariably, the lack of coordination between agencies manifests here too. As a result, the problems tend to repeat regularly or come back in another form.
The Malleswaram and Doddanekundi projects have shown that if the community’s efforts are brought together to create robust proposals with the participation of all stakeholders, everyone will align.
Creating an inclusive and vetted project proposal is also key to unlocking funding for the same, including potentially integrating it within existing municipal works and budget allocations.
Until 2021, Malleswaram residents fought for four years to fix footpaths along the 30 km of roads. However, the four-month-long creation of the walkable Malleswaram project led to delineating a 3 km strategic walking network that connects the whole ward. Moreover, it instantly made the undertaking easier and more feasible with all stakeholders aligning and allocating required funds.
The same is true in Doddanekundi, where the local project making process led to planning a cycling network only along 14 of the 56 km road network that would still connect all the major destinations in the neighbourhood. Different typologies such as sharrow, MUP and protected cycle lanes are planned to optimise space and cost.
Overall, in Malleswaram, 85% of the budget has come through the municipality, facilitated by the local MLA, and also enabled partnerships with several local stakeholders such as traffic police, local vendors, residents living in the conservancies, other neighbourhood residents etc., for implementation on the ground.
#5 | Adopting multiple modes of communication is vital to building support
Community-based projects can be dynamic since they are susceptible to significant shifts upon discovering new knowledge, opportunities or decisions by authorities. Further, given that the process of making them is primarily organic and informal, it’s almost impossible to keep all existing or new stakeholders fully engaged/informed. It is especially true since each stakeholder can have varied capacities, interests and time. The goal is therefore to create multiple modes of communication in order to cater to different stakeholders and offer numerous exposures.
There is a common perception that including the many stakeholders during the process will only slow the project down or cause more hurdles. However, our experience in these neighbourhood projects demonstrates that communication is key to helping build transparency, trust and sustained support.
Some of the key mediums we have used are listed below.
a) Whatsapp groups have served as the first point of contact and closed group communication amongst the core working group to share everyday progress and address queries and quick decisions.
b) 2–3 min short project videos have been key to communicating the core idea of the projects to any new stakeholder in a simple, humanised and contextual way. At the same time, providing a unified visual narrative for existing community groups, assembling all the patchwork of progress made so far. These videos have also been pivotal in onboarding the different government officials and agencies and increasing public awareness and engagement.
c) Independent public websites for each project have served as a handy platform to aggregate information about the process and progress of the projects. It has served as a documentation tool and a channel for information dissemination and democratising the public project.
d) Newspaper articles have been the fastest medium to spread awareness and excitement in the neighbourhood and the city. They have also helped build the credibility of the project.
e) Social media such as Instagram and Twitter have helped offer instant response from the public and create interest in unaccounted stakeholders. They also pay long term dividends by assimilating archival material for people to discover organically at another moment.
Communication has not just been about winning over support but creating channels to invite stakeholders in to incorporate their needs and perspectives.
#6 | A robust system for timely response and resolution of issues with the government
The USP of community-based projects is that they are generally smaller and more doable. Hence, easier to accomplish within fixed timelines and potentially replicable as well. However, in order for local residents and community groups to take leadership in creating public projects, government agencies have a key role to play in providing ready, assured support to ensure smooth progress. The scope of this support includes -
- Aiding connects with relevant government agencies
- Help acquire all the required permissions
- Offer a timely review of the projects
- Provide conflict resolution within the projects by acting as an ombudsman
To accomplish this, government agencies need to allocate dedicated resources. They also need to form strict protocols and timelines for issue resolution that are reliable and predictable.
The reality is that if a project goes on too long, stakeholders lose faith and often start to rethink objectives and deliverables. All the while, budgets remain fixed, resulting in a highly compromised result. Shortening the proposal to implementation journey is critical to the sustenance of a project.
#7 | Private funding can be a catalyst for enabling project making and experimentation
Government funding can only be mobilised if there is a ‘Detailed Project Report’ (DPR). It means that there is no support for the softer activities such as diagnosing issues, building data-led evidence, conducting participatory sessions to bring stakeholders together, creating contextual solutions with the help of technical experts etc. While these processes are relatively linear, the pathway to go from the project proposal to seeking funding and approvals is highly unpredictable.
Private funding can offer a financial bridge for the pre-DPR period to support the making of community projects in an inclusive and process-oriented way to further unlock larger public financing. It can also help nurture innovation and drastically reduce the overall timeline for impact on the ground.
#8 | City-level visions and frameworks can enable community projects at scale
Setting city visions and targets can go a long way in nudging actors at the local level to drive action. They can provide context to help evaluate the status quo and offer an objective way forward. At the same time, city governments’ creation of frameworks (that include toolkits, standards, and datasets) can provide much-needed guidance for local actors on how to conceive and realise local projects.
It is particularly relevant when solving complex challenges like developing neighbourhood level cycling infrastructure, like in Doddankundi, Bengaluru.
In Bengaluru, there is already a strong resistance to accommodating cycling on the road because it means taking space away from vehicles. Moreover, despite the declaration of cycling districts in the city, there is currently no overarching city cycle network that can guide how individual neighbourhoods can develop their cycle plans. In this context, it is incredibly complex for community groups to negotiate space for cycling by themselves in the absence of a city vision.
Further, in the absence of any policy that enforces adhering to strict standards and guidelines for designing cycle lanes in the city, local communities have been left to their own devices to figure out critical aspects such as -
- Negotiating standards for the width of cycle lanes
- Minimum vs maximum carriage way width to be maintained when complimenting a cycle lane or footpath
- Suitability of different typologies of cycle lanes to the typology of streets
- Guidelines and logic systems to design different types of junctions and connections between different types of cycle lanes
There are also no city targets such as the number of vehicular trips at the wards/neighbourhood level to be converted to cycling or improving air quality in a specific timeframe. It means there is no real quantifiable support or buy-in for cycling from the government to be leveraged to get stakeholders together or unlock public funds.
In conclusion, we’d like to leave you with the imagination— take a city like Bengaluru, which has over 2000+ community groups; if these were empowered with the necessary support from all key stakeholders, would we not be able to solve for adoption of sustainable mobility at scale?
