Bengaluru T2’s tropical aesthetic is out of place – a bit like the ‘Garden City’ moniker

Bengaluru Airport’s newly renovated, much-discussed Terminal-2 features lush landscaping that draws on the city’s heritage as a “garden city” to brand itself the “terminal in a garden”.

The ambitious plans for the green spaces developed by the UK- and Singapore-based landscape architecture firm Grant Associates make nature ubiquitous in the experience of the airport.

Nature is everywhere.

There are plants suspended from bell-shaped scaffolds to massive green walls that snake their way through the airport. There are double-height foyers and vestibules through which palms and skinny trees perforate the built-space. There is an impressive two-storeyed waterfall that provides a panoramic background to the baggage-claim belts.

This is not only landscape design, say the executive designers, Landscape Accord. This is choreography.

The impact is almost that of visiting a museum and seeing dioramas behind glass cases: an endless parade of carefully curated vistas that not only delight, but impress and inform.

The average passer-by may not give the dramatic spectacles of nature any importance above aesthetic appreciation, but as architect Balkrishna Doshi said, “I talk to nature, and nature talks back to me.” The nature that designers create and curate also talks back to users, and reinforces narratives and ideas of what nature and beauty are.

However, in the case of Bengaluru airport, those narratives seem far removed from their local, or even their regional context.

As travellers walk through the airport, the plantings tell the story of verdant tropical plantings conjuring images of a per-humid climate like that of a dense tropical forest. Ecologically, this is consonant with rainforest ecosystems like the Western Ghats of those in South East Asia. Aesthetically, this draws on tropical landscape aesthetics typical of modern landscapes in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Seeing the portfolio of high-profile projects previously designed by Grant Associates such as the Gardens by the Bay and the Grant Hyatt Hotel in Singapore, this is in line with their aesthetic vocabulary. Apart from being an entirely imported aesthetic divorced from its local or historical context, the design implies that this is what nature looks like in this part of the world.

It is most decidedly not. Karnataka consists primarily of three ecoregions – the Western Ghats rainforests, the south Deccan Plateau dry deciduous forests and the Deccan thorn scrub forests. Except for the first of these, the others simply do not support the kind of tropical flora utilised in the airport.

Bengaluru in particular, located on the Mysore plateau is a seasonally dry, semi-arid landscape with shrubby, mostly low-lying vegetation. This begs the question of how a city founded in this natural ecology got the monicker of the “garden city” in the first place. To attempt an answer requires a brief inquiry into the origins of the urban landscape aesthetic in Bengaluru.

The earliest version of the garden city in the context of Bengaluru can be traced back to the 16th century, and was characterised by the tota or multi-use market garden around which urban settlements were organised. These were made possible by a sophisticated and ancient network of over a thousand cascading and interlinked waterbodies (“kere”, in Kannada) that ensured perennial water in the otherwise dry landscape.

Totas consisted of mixed plantings of economic plantation crops, including coffee, spices, fruits and timber. They were the precursor of today’s plantations and estates.

Gardens in the 18th century under the cultural influence of the Deccan sultanates and planted by rulers like Haider Ali, incorporated Mughal aesthetics including an influx of species that defined the latter. Roses, cypresses and fruit trees were planted in gardens like Lalbagh, which continued to exist in the tota-kere urban fabric of Bengaluru, operating in a mode between agri- and horti-culture with the aim of expanding production and commerce in the growing city.

The garden city witnessed the first truly foreign landscape influence at this time, when Haider Ali planted formal palace gardens in Srirangapatna in the “French taste”, and his son Tipu Sultan introduced many plants of horticultural and economic importance (as well as gardeners) from France and Mauritius to the gardens and totas of Bengaluru.

Tipu’s espousal of French tastes and technologies was perhaps as much a political choice as it was an aesthetic one, as he was counting on the support of Napoleon to rid India of the British.

This was not to be. When Bangalore was annexed by the British East India Company at the turn of the 18th century, Bangalore’s gardens became temporary depots for holding and testing introduced plants of commercial importance. Hundreds of species were introduced to the urban landscape through the imperial network of botanical gardens (including those in Calcutta and Bombay).

The garden city entered its English era. Gardens such as Cubbon Park were established in the “Victorian style”, which were crucially used to “introduce the Wodeyar princes and the native elites to European tastes for recreation and British ways of urban living”.

The present interpretation of the garden city concept in Bengaluru was perhaps most greatly influenced by the German horticulturist Gustav Herman Krumbiegel, who served Mysore state in many capacities including as Superintendent of Horticulture for 24 years from 1908 and 1932.

While he continued the longstanding tradition of developing economic botany and market-gardening, as an architectural consultant to the state, Krumbiegel crucially introduced the concept of “bioaesthetic planning” in the conceptualisation and planting of urban spaces.

In line with European aesthetic ideals, in Bengaluru this was interpreted as planting trees that would flower sequentially throughout the year, and provide year-round interest in the urban landscape. Krumbiegel’s palette included trees from across the world such as gulmohurs, colvilleas, African tulip-trees, copperpods, jacarandas, crepe myrtles, and amaltas, placing a clear emphasis on the ornamental value of the species.

So while the paradigm of the “garden city” in the context of Bengaluru predates colonial influence, the urban form it brings to mind today is far removed from its kere-tota origins.

Over time, Bengaluru’s urban landscape aesthetic has gone from projecting agricultural subsistence, to a particular style of European urbaneness, to projecting a technocratic vision for a modern Indian city.

Modern landscape design largely overlooks this historical context to take the term at face value. However a question for landscape designers and urban planners today should be how the term can be reimagined for our present context.

Contemporary urban planting in India largely draws on a design language developed in South America and South East Asia, complete with its vocabulary of plants, as is reflected in the plantings in the New Airport. Aroids, ferns and other foliage plants dominate its sterile living walls; palms, birds-of-paradise, heliconias and a whole host of other imported foliage and flowers reflect an ostentatious and generic tropicality.

The endangered species that the airport claims to conserve (perplexing, given that it is not a botanical garden or similar conservation organisation) are in fact African cycads. This species, says the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, is one of the most illegally trafficked plants on the planet.

The “600- to 800-year-old trees” that the designers claim to have transplanted are from Europe – they are in fact olive trees. The spindly forms of Madagascar almonds (Terminalia mantaly) are everywhere – making one wonder whether the over 16 species of native trees in the genus were not suitable for consideration.

This interpretation of the “garden city” seems to be yet another appropriation of foreign aesthetics and plantings, to project the “world-class” aspirations of the metropolis. The problem here lies with the ecological cost of such an aesthetic, both in terms of the resources required to maintain it in an unsuitable dry environment, as well as the subconscious establishment of the belief that this is what good site-specific landscaping, and nature more broadly looks like.

The greatest cost of the new terminal is perhaps the opportunity cost of what could have been a showcase of an innovative, paradigm-shifting reimagination of the culturally and ecologically relevant “garden city”.

Soham Kacker is an ecologist, horticulturist and writer interested in the intersection of plant science, literature, culture and history. He is currently based in Sri Lanka where he serves as the Garden Curator for the Geoffrey Bawa Trust. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.