(Un)bundling Bangalore: Infrastructure bundling 'best practices' and assembling novel scapes

•We examine how infrastructure bundling best practices reconfigures urban scapes.•Our study draws on ANT-inspired 'assemblage urbanism' for studying urban networks.•Our infrastructurescapes typology features: boundaries, intersections, cul-de-sacs, peopling.•We examine the role of business and civic coalitions in infrastructure best practices-making.•Findings refer to infrastructure-linked urban fragmentation and public exclusions.

This paper focuses on the socio-material, political and spatial implications of urban infrastructure bundling practices. Our work examines how network bundling best practices piloted in the Indian city of Bangalore (Bengaluru) have been deployed as a policy model for urban road re-engineering. Drawing on work in actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired assemblage urbanism and policy mobilities, we examine the assembling of Bengaluru's Vittal Mallya (VM) Road in conjunction with Tender-SURE (Tender Specifications for Urban Road Execution) as showcase projects for bundled network infrastructures. Our paper introduces an 'infrastructurescape' typology - boundaries, intersections, cul-de-sacs and peopling - as an analytic for examining the socio-material and spatio-political implications of bundling. Our findings discuss the rise of powerful local infrastructure coalitions of private and civic interests in Bengaluru. Besides the low accountability of these coalitions, we identify the potential problematic effects of infrastructure bundling including: spatial exclusions and fragmentation; the valorization of commercial space and automobility; and the limited participation of wider publics in shaping urban infrastructural futures. Bundling urban networks and setting local urban infrastructural priorities, we suggest, represent politically-charged processes that reconfigure specific city streets and scapes. Infrastructure bundling practices have important implications for the city-at-large and the city-region of the future in India and beyond.