Tracking Bengaluru’s dramatic urban transformation through the entanglements of finance, land frenzy, real estate volatility, and livelihood upheavals

Over the past two decades, Bengaluru’s exploding real estate sector and massive infrastructure investments have led to land speculation targeting working-class neighborhoods and agricultural land for development. Chronicles of a Global City turns Bengaluru inside out to examine its “world-city” transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. Moving the spotlight away from the urban elites and “new middle class,” this book explores how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change in Bengaluru—from construction laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, and platform delivery workers to small-time property brokers, petty landlords, and local politicians—experience, struggle, aspire, invent, strive, and speculate to make a livable city for themselves.

Grounded in long-term ethnographic research and activist experiences, Chronicles of a Global City vividly illuminates the multifaceted entanglements of finance capital, real estate markets, livelihood struggles, and fraying ecologies in urban and peri-urban Bengaluru. Its anchoring concept, “speculative urbanism,” provides a powerful, innovative lens for understanding the risk-laden practices of leveraging land, labor, and resources for the promise of future profit.

Contributors: Hemangini Gupta, Pierre Hauser, Priyanka Krishna, Eesha Kunduri, Kaveri Medappa, Usha Rao, Shaheen Shasa, Swathi Shivanand, Vinay K. Sreenivasa.

Vinay Gidwani is professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (Minnesota, 2008).

Michael Goldman is associate professor of sociology and global studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization.

Carol Upadhya is visiting professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, and author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy.

Janaki Nair is author of Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (Minnesota, 2011) and The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century.

Malini Ranganathan is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University and coauthor of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City.