Sustainability and the city

BENGALURU: Is Bengaluru a good place to work? Where does the city’s food come from? Is its future sustainable? These are just a few questions that a new podcast by Bengaluru Sustainability Forum (BSF) aims to explore. Called the Ooru Podcast, it is their first audio series, and looks at sustainability through the city’s lens.

“There are so many stories that people don’t know about. When we were thinking of which format to consider for this, we knew a webinar would be too short-lived. But a well-produced podcast can be revisited by someone years later too, and through it, they can get a glimpse of what Bengaluru was like,” says BSF coordinator Dr Lena Robra.

The five-part series will be released in January 2021 and will be available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. 

Bengaluru has earned itself many titles – Garden City, IT City, and lately, the city that will soon run out of water. But this podcast, assures Robra, is not all about doom and gloom. “We want to use it to inspire people and tell them about the work being done, and how there is hope for our future,” she adds.

Since the podcast is Bengaluru-specific, the BSF team reached out to a city-based podcast production company, Vaaka Media, for collaboration. The episodes will cover different themes like working in the city, its outdoors, urban planning, food production and sustainability in its future.

The creators hope to deconstruct larger issues, by breaking them down into more conversational topics. “For example, if you ask a resident their thoughts on urban mobility, they are likely to say they have none. If you instead bring up the bus corridors, they will tell you what they think about it,” explains Radhika Viswanathan, who along with Samyuktha Varma, Menaka Raman and Erwick d’Souza forms the team at Vaaka Media. 

The 20-30 minutes long episode will also feature stakeholders and experts from fields like economics, urban planning, food production, and water and sanitisation. While podcasts are known for their lean-back, passive listening experience, the team thought of making it more interactive by including citizen contribution.

Stories of sustainability can be sent to them, either in written form or through voice notes, at team@vaaka.in. “We also plan to include more voices by the city’s youth. They tend to be less cynical and will, after all, inherit Bengaluru’s sustainable future,” says Varma.