On the Culture of Infrastructure
Date: 3rd April, 2025
As part of its continuing effort to advance design-led urban inquiry and collaboration, MOD Foundation hosted the second edition of the City Shapers Collective in April 2025. Building on the momentum of its inaugural edition, City Shapers Collective 2.0 turned its lens toward the Foundation’s new thematic — Infraculture — exploring how infrastructure can be reimagined as a cultural, ecological, and social framework rather than just a technical one.
Indian cities today stand at a crossroads. As Bengaluru grapples with issues of sustainability, equity, and liveability, there is a pressing need to rethink infrastructure — not as isolated, problem-solving systems, but as interconnected spaces that shape everyday urban experience. Infraculture proposes this shift: a way to integrate people, place, and policy by embedding care, accountability, and imagination into the making of the city.
The Collective brought together practitioners and thinkers who work across diverse disciplines — from water management and urban design to filmmaking, storytelling, and public engagement — each offering a unique way of understanding and communicating the urban.
Radhika Sundaresan, Senior Researcher at WELL Labs’ Urban Water Programme, spoke about mainstreaming nature-based solutions and the importance of working at the intersection of water, climate, and policy. Her reflections on Bengaluru’s water systems urged a more ecological and integrative approach to infrastructure.
Pravar Chaudhary, designer and founder of Bengawalk, shared insights from his multimedia work that tells stories of Bangalore’s public spaces, transport, and urban politics. Through film and digital storytelling, he showed how narratives can make the complexities of infrastructure visible and relatable.
Nitya Misra, an independent filmmaker, explored the drama of everyday life through her lens — using film, writing, and sound to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. Her work suggested how creative storytelling can uncover the subtle infrastructures that shape our collective experience of the city.
Vinay Parameswarappa, founder of Gully Tours, reflected on the role of walking, storytelling, and local histories in connecting people to place. His approach to curation and lived engagement with the city emphasized how participation and curiosity can turn infrastructure into shared cultural experience.
Sarthak Pradhan, Associate Fellow at The Takshashila Institution, discussed the economics and ethics of infrastructure, addressing questions of who pays, who benefits, and how governance and policy can evolve to serve people more equitably.
Together, these conversations positioned City Shapers Collective 2.0 as a space for rethinking the relationships between infrastructure, culture, and citizenship. The discussions called for integrated planning that builds for connection, visibility, and accountability — where infrastructure is not a backdrop to urban life, but an active, lived part of it.
At its heart, the City Shapers Collective continues to nurture a community of people, institutions, and entrepreneurs working on the city in different ways — bringing together diverse voices to shape Bengaluru’s evolving story.
