As Bangalore has boomed, the quaint old planned neighbourhood of Malleswaram has felt the effects of rampant urbanisation. As a result, residents are forced to abandon walking and cycling due to heavy traffic in quiet residential streets along with a host of other challenges such as footpath encroachment and poor design, missing first-and-last mile connectivity, dangerous junctions, speeding vehicles. In response, community groups mounted several campaigns to bring attention to this grave problem, forcing decision-makers to respond. One of these is Malleswaram Social’s ‘BharatnatyamSaaku’ video for the #FootpathBeku’, which went viral, garnering over 10 million views! Malleswaram residents advocated for walkable footpaths for over five years with not much improvement on the ground. It is then that the idea of setting up a Neighborhood scale Urban Living Lab was conceived by Malleswaram Social (a local community group) and Sensing Local Foundation (an Urban Planning think tank). The key role of the living lab is to create a user-centred, iterative, open-innovation ecosystem for co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation of innovative ideas, scenarios, concepts and related technological artefacts in real-life use cases. The Walkable Malleswaram project was one of the first projects conceived by Malleswaram Urban Living Lab (M-ULL) in 2020 and received funding and implementation support from the government (BBMP and DULT) in January 2021.
