ARI Working Paper Series

In urban India, there are religious practices intersecting with the process of urbanisation at various levels. This paper looks at the practice of tree worship which continues to be a part of the everyday lives of the people. Specifically, it looks at how the Peepul tree (Ficus Religiosa) shrine with its serpent stones and the raised platform around it, locally called the katte, contributes to the territorial production of urban space in the city of Bangalore. Based on a study of ten kattes in multiple locations around the city, it finds that these urban spaces belong either to a process of territorialisation by the local community or its de-territorialisation by the government. The territorialisation occurs when people start to create a community space around the tree. The paper proposes that the katte as a human activity node contributes to an urban web or the physical layer and the peepul tree contributes to a network of relations or the social layer and these two overlapping layers can help generate an ordering principle of urban design.

Full text is not available. This working paper is withdrawn, as it has now beenpublished as an article“The practice of tree worship and the territorial production of urban space in the Indian neighbourhood“, in the Journal of Urban Design, Volume 22, 2017 – Issue 3, pages 370-387.  (Published online: 6 Feb 2017).