Overview

Sathyanagar (roughly translated as "Truth Town" in Sanskrit) is a self-built settlement on the north-east periphery of Bangalore, created in the 1970s when rural migrants from the neighboring states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu staked their claim to this leftover land on a dry lake bed. The settlement lies between a military establishment, a railway line, an industrial storage area, and an abandoned and overgrown tank, or reservoir. In the 1970s, founding families organized themselves into a registered cooperative society and secured official tenure, and community elders laid out an organized plan of street patterns and housing parcels. At the time of registration in 1972, Sathyanagar had 152 houses on 4.5 hectares. These original parcels have been subdivided, developed and populated to the point that, at the time of the project fieldwork, there were approximately 550 houses with a population of over 3000. This process of densification is likely to continue, as Sathyanagar and surrounding areas were recently annexed by the Bangalore Municipality and are undergoing a process of rapid urbanization.

The Growing Up in Cities project in Sathyanagar was directed by Kanchan Bannerjee, an education expert with the Centre for Environment Education at the time, and David Driskell, an independent urban planner. Work here provided an opportunity to explore a community about to undergo more intensive forms of urbanization, providing potential policy and planning guidance for local decision makers based on the needs of young people living in such areas. Staff at the Centre for Environment Education were trained to work with 38 children from the ages of 10 through 14 using standard project methods: formal and informal observations of public space use, structured interviews, drawings, walking tours, and staff and child-taken photographs. Two other local nongovernmental organizations, DEEDS (the Development Education Society) and TIDE (Technology Informatics Design Endeavour) carried out a community mapping and site survey.

These methods revealed lives of severe economic hardship, environmental hazards, and social and political injustice, but also lives of great energy, self-reliance, inventiveness and resilience. The children were partly protected from the stressors around them by family networks, friendships and cohesive cultural traditions, as well as an environment where they felt secure to move about and which provided a variety of open spaces where they could play and meet with friends. This observation is not meant to excuse the official world's failure to meet these children's basic needs, but to suggest how much could be achieved if opportunities were provided while the settlement's existing social and physical resources were protected.

As well as an account of these young people's lives, Growing Up in Cities-India inadvertently turned into a case study of institutional resistance to participatory planning processes. The project received funding from NORAD (Norwegian Aid) to conduct model processes of participatory planning with all groups in the community: girls and women as well as men and boys, and people of all ages. Growing Up in Cities was the first phase of this process, which was intended to culminate in an integrated community action plan to guide further development investment. As the research with the children neared completion, a distant Centre for Environment Education administrator cancelled the project and reallocated the funding to other purposes. Despite this arbitrary unilateral action, one of the children's goals was achieved when the Children's Hour Helping Fund of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation provided for the construction of a Children's Center on land donated by a community member. In this new center, children can receive training in useful vocations such as carpentry for the boys and toy making for the girls, school-going children can study in the afternoons, and younger siblings can play in the mornings. To this extent, the children's ideas were implemented; but given institutional support for participation, much more could have been achieved.