Walk ‘On’ Bangalore is a research and public engagement project by Mod Foundation that explores the historical growth and spatial transformation of Bengaluru through archival cartography. Developed as part of the long-term Mapping Bengaluru initiative, the project studies how the city’s morphology has evolved over time through maps, planning records, and historical documentation.
The experience is curated using a collection of archival maps tracing Bengaluru’s evolution from the earliest recorded map in 1791 to the 2002 Survey of India map. Through detailed archival research and spatial analysis, Mod Foundation mapped the shifts in the city’s urban form — from the pete and cantonment structure to industrial expansion, infrastructural growth, institutional development, and metropolitan sprawl.
Rather than presenting maps as static historical documents, the project transforms them into an immersive and participatory public experience. Using large-scale floor projections, participants physically walk across different moments in Bengaluru’s history, observing how roads, neighbourhoods, ecologies, and public infrastructure have emerged, expanded, fragmented, or disappeared over time.
Project
Walk ‘on‘ Bangalore – Mapping the City
Year
2025
What We Did
Research and Documentation, Curation, Experience Design, Facilitation
Status
Completed
The curation focuses on making urban history observable and accessible to wider audiences. By combining research, mapping, design, and storytelling, the experience encourages participants to connect personal memories and everyday experiences of the city with larger processes of planning, governance, migration, industrialisation, and environmental change.
Walk ‘On’ Bangalore reflects Mod Foundation’s approach to research-led curation — where archival material becomes a tool for public dialogue, critical reflection, and collective understanding of the city. The project positions mapping not only as documentation, but as a way of reading, questioning, and engaging with Bengaluru’s past, present, and possible futures.
Focusing on three key areas of housing, institutions and industry, this experience focuses on asking, observing and understanding, why these cam up, how they were planned, and what were the precursors for their existence.
The city saw waves of new residents, starting with the cantonment. By the end of the 19th Century, extensions to the city as suburban layouts happened on the east and the west, namely in the Cantonment and in the City regions.
After independence, new planned housing extensions like Jayanagar and Rajajinagar were formed. Residential townships were formed near new Public Sector Undertakings that were established in the city like HMT, BEL, ITI, etc.
Plotted style residential development continued in Bengaluru into the 21st Century, with BDA layouts like Banashankari, JP Nagar slowly being replaced by gated communities and enclaves in the early 21st Century.
Setting up of institutions in the city laid the strong foundations for its subsequent growth
Institutions for governance, research, technology and healthcare have had a long history in the city, encouraged by both the Mysore and the British administrations
What were the first industries in the city? And how did they come up?
From industry starting in the erstwhile Mysore State, along the railway line, industry in Bangalore has come a long way from PSU’s to MNCs. Here we focus on the why, when and what determining factors for setting up these industries have been, and how they have affected the morphology of the city.
