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Urban commons are under pressure. City development has led to the encroachment and ecological degradation of urban open space. Although there is growing insight that urban ecosystems need to be protected, there is hardly any attention for the consequences (of both pressures and protection efforts) for vulnerable human population groups. We aim to understand how urban development affects the well-being of the urban poor, through shifts in ecosystem services (ES) and people’s responses to these shifts. We performed household interviews and group mapping sessions in seven urban lake communities in Bangalore, India. Changes at Bangalore’s lakes can be summarized by three trends: privatization followed by conversion, pollution followed by degradation, and restoration followed by gentrification. Over time, this resulted in a shift in the types of ES supplied and demanded, the nature of use, and de …