Chronicles of a Global City
eBook - PDF

Chronicles of a Global City

Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru

  1. 357 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Chronicles of a Global City

Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Chronicles of a Global City by Vinay Gidwani,Michael Goldman,Carol Upadhya in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Global Development Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Foreword
  6. Note on Confidentiality
  7. Abbreviations
  8. Introduction: Bengaluru as Urban Future
  9. Part I: Speculative Stories
  10. Part II: Financial Stratagems
  11. Part III: State Speculations
  12. Part IV: Speculative Subjects
  13. Part V: Labor in the Speculative City
  14. Part VI: Ecologies of Speculation
  15. Afterword
  16. Acknowledgments
  17. Contributors
  18. Index
  19. Photo Essay: Life in the Speculative City
  20. Spatial Images Depicting Expansion of Built-up Area and Changing Land Cover in Bengaluru, 2000–2001