Regime of Congestion: Technopolitics of Mobility and Inequality in Bengaluru, India

Vehicular congestion on the streets of Bengaluru has been tackled, since the late 1990s at least, through a hybrid coalition of actors, technologies, norms, and discourses that have political consequences. Technopolitical regimes, understood as an ordering that enrolls technologies and artifacts amongst other things to achieve specific political aims, is a particularly apposite framing for delineating the ways by which congestion is problematized and addressed in urban areas, such as Bengaluru. Relying on this framing, a range of entities such as mega-infrastructure projects, 'super bureaucrats,' investment plans, and discourses of infrastructure deficiency constitute the regime of congestion. Bengaluru's regime of congestion has become associated with a discernible political intent that redefines streets into entities reserved for vehicular traffic and at the same time marginalizes the mobility needs of the urban poor and the nonmotorized. In the process, not only is public transit becoming a less inviting option, but it incentivizes the switch to private vehicles, thereby reinforcing the existing regime. It is this self-perpetuating cycle that accounts for the stability of the regime of congestion. This offers two insights for theory development. First, with the circulation of world-class city discourses, urban technopolitical regimes possess a distinctly hybrid global-local (or glocal) constitution that weaves together global norms with local concerns and actors. Second, interlinkages between material, institutional, and political actors create an entity that exists in a self-perpetuating cycle, thus unlocking such a regime would require revitalizing coexistence across multiple modalities of mobility infrastructures.