Has the city become history?
Really, I mean, the city becomes like an onion, and you get a completely different sort of perspective as you peel these layers away.
Hemangini Gupta:The most marginalized actors in the city provide the sort of financial circuits and money and debt that are necessary for this dream of the world city to survive.
Swathi Shivanand:So I think that gamble that people are taking, hoping for that deal that's that'll set them up for life is something that I think the book does a fantastic job capturing.
Kaveri Medappa:The goalpost is always moving and you're always chasing it, but you somehow are never there.
Michael Goldman:This one really tells an amazing array of stories to make both academic and public knowledge kind of arguments about what's happening in our cities.
Vinay Gidwani:Okay. Well, welcome listeners to this podcast on Chronicles of a Global City. I am Vinay Gidwani. I'm one of the coeditors of this book, and I am a professor of geography and global studies at University of Minnesota. And before we proceed any further, I'm going to go around the room and ask my collaborators to briefly introduce themselves.
Hemangini Gupta:Hi, everyone. So I'm Hemangini Gupta, and I was the postdoc on this project from 2017 to 2019. And I'm currently a lecturer in gender and global politics at the University of Edinburgh.
Michael Goldman:Thanks, Emangiri. My name is Michael Goldman. I am a professor at the University of Minnesota as well in sociology and global studies. I, have been doing research in and around Bengaluru for more than fifteen years, so this was quite an exciting endeavor to work with a bunch of colleagues and, local activists and storytellers and agents of change in the city itself. And this book is a wonderful product from that experience.
Kaveri Medappa:Hi, everyone. My name is Kaveri Medappa. I used to be the research associate on project from 2017 to 2018. I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher in human geography at the University of Oxford.
Swathi Shivanand:My name is Swathi Shivanand and I teach at the Department of Liberal Arts at Manipal Academy Of Higher Education. I currently stay in Bangalore and have been Bangorian for all my life. I've been working on history and urban history, urban studies, and Bangalore's not just home, but also a site of study. So this project on which in which I was a consultant was something that triggered my interest again in Bangalore. So I'm grateful for being able to be part of this project.
Vinay Gidwani:Great. Well, thank you all. As you probably might imagine, we are scattered across the continents, and I think it's perhaps a a mark of how Bengaluru as a city has ramified itself across the world. So I just want to say something briefly about the book's motivations, its genesis, what it's trying to do. As many know firsthand, including those who are part of this conversation, Bangalore, which is now Bengaluru, was once a quiet small city in Southern India, known primarily for its scientific and technical institutions and public sector enterprises.
Vinay Gidwani:Bengaluru has now rapidly transformed by the advent of software outsourcing, by economic reforms in India that have led to deindustrialization and the shift to a service sector based economy. And these changes have been reflected in the dramatic growth of the real estate industry across cities in India, but perhaps none more than Bengaluru itself. So Chronicles of a Global City tries to stage the story of Bengaluru's urban transformation through the lives of ordinary people as well as the powerful actors who have driven this city's reinvention into an aspirationally world class city. The volume, which I think is best described as collaborative ethnography, brings together a montage of 22 short chapters written in an engaging and accessible style and a striking photo essay to explore the social and ecological consequences of what we call speculative urbanism, the concept that anchors this book and which owes, to a wonderful article written in 2011 by one of the coeditors of this book, Michael Goldman, who's present in this podcast. So the book really tries to turn the city of Bengaluru inside out, narrating the layered histories of Bengaluru's transformation through the lives, as I said, of ordinary people as well as the behind the scenes movers and shakers who have built and who run the city.
Vinay Gidwani:It tries to move the spotlight away, to a large extent from just the urban elites and the new middle class who are driving these changes to explore how diverse communities and actors who are caught up in the whirlwind of change in Bengaluru from construction laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, and delivery boys to small time property brokers, petty landlords, and local politicians. How these diverse set of actors experience, struggle, aspire, invent, and strive to make a livable city for themselves. So with that, I will pause and perhaps turn it over to Himangani Gupta to say something about the story that she tells in this book and what she finds interesting and exciting about the book itself.
Hemangini Gupta:Thanks, Vinay. So maybe I'll take the second question first in terms of what I find interesting about the book. So as Swati mentioned, having been born and brought up in a city and then doing research there. So like Swati, I also was born and brought up in Bangalore. Doing research for this book was really transformative in a way because it really helped me to see the layers of the city.
Hemangini Gupta:The odd thing about this research project is that it takes place just five minutes from where I was brought up and from where my family has lived since the early 1900s. As we did research on this project, I was able to understand sort of migration into and out of neighborhoods. I was able to see how financial circuits animate these neighborhoods. I was able to understand local ecologies of land and water and air and also make connections between all of these different things. You know, as a resident of a city, you often walk in a neighborhood or you live somewhere and you see the facades changing and you know your neighborhood is changing dramatically, but you sort of see one one level of it.
Hemangini Gupta:And then when you begin to do research over sort of multi year project like this one was, I was able to see these invisible histories come to life. So even now, where I'm sitting recording this podcast is just a few minutes from many of our field sites. And I feel that every time I go back to those places now, I will never quite see them in the same way. And so for me, maybe it's just a really personal story about what's exciting about this project. It's the fact that it has shown me a city I thought I knew very well in a very different light.
Hemangini Gupta:And I feel like I won't quite see it the same way after having read this book. And I also wanted to share a little bit about the chapter that I wrote for the book. It's informal settlement that was in one of our field sites, and it was built on private land, and we'd been tracking it for a while. And then one day, as we were driving past, we noticed that it had been totally razed to the ground. We became interested in what promises were made about that land and what was going to happen to that land.
Hemangini Gupta:What happened to all the people who used to live there? Where had they gone and where were they now? And so over the next year and some, we began to try to track all of those residents. And then we also found that there were other informal settlements that had been raised to the ground. And we discovered that the local government officials had promised to build sort of modern apartment complexes in place of those informal settlements.
Hemangini Gupta:So one of the stories that we tell is of a place that we call Kalanagar and of a person called Mani. So we managed to find Mani who had now moved into a modern apartment complex in place of an informal settlement where he once lived. And so we went to visit him in his new house. And that meeting is something that has really stayed with me. Mani and his wife, and they have three sons, they were all very keen on moving into this new apartment complex.
Hemangini Gupta:And they told us many times that where they'd lived before had stagnant water. It was always flooding in the monsoon. There were mosquitoes everywhere. And so they very much wanted this new building and they'd moved in here. They'd paid also an enormous price in many ways.
Hemangini Gupta:And so he explained to us that they've been given some compensation money to navigate the real estate market in the area until the apartment building was built and he had to pay a deposit and he had to pay really expensive rent because it's such a competitive real estate market. And so essentially he'd gone into debt while he was waiting for his new house to be built. And so when we visited him, he'd moved in, but he was also in debt and he was happy. And his wife showed us the new apartment and the new shelving in the kitchen. They were very proud of it.
Hemangini Gupta:But he was also, I think, very conscious of the fact that it was barely big enough to contain his immediate nuclear family. So he has three sons. And even as we were doing the interview, the boys kept coming in and out of the apartment because we couldn't all fit in there together. And he said he was still paying rent on a previous place that he was using as storage. So I think that moment was very stark because it reminded us that he wouldn't, for instance, when his sons got married, they wouldn't be able to bring their wives to live with him and his family.
Hemangini Gupta:They wouldn't be able to raise their kids there. They wouldn't just be able to build a sort of floor above their house because this was an apartment complex and they couldn't do that. The dream of living in a modern apartment building was something that they held on to very strongly. But when it finally happened, it wasn't quite everything that they'd expected. And so there was this mix of feeling of both, yes, this is wonderful, we're here.
Hemangini Gupta:But also it's just disappointing in so many ways. And I think the other thing that I would want to mention is how we found them at all. So we weren't given an exact address for where they were. We were just given a general locality. And so we began walking around trying to find money and where the apartment complex might be.
Hemangini Gupta:And we turned a corner and suddenly we found a street that was just full of people on the street. There were people talking to each other, playing games on the street. There were dogs. There were people just, you know, moving in and out of an apartment. Somehow, instinctively, we felt this might be where the informal settlement once was.
Hemangini Gupta:And we were right. There were these forms of relating to each other and these forms of sociality that people had that couldn't almost be contained in that modern apartment complex. And they'd spilled onto the street and they'd sort of taken over the street. And I think that's something that probably changed so much from when they moved from that informal settlement that was so densely interconnected to this more sort of modern apartment complex. And so that's a chapter in the book that talks about what we call low finance in terms of the ways in which the most marginalised actors in the city provide the financial circuits and money and debt that are necessary for this dream of the world city to survive.
Vinay Gidwani:What a great story, Imam Gini. Thank you for sharing that with us. And I think it provides a wonderful glimpse into the conundrums of the transformations that Bengaluru is undergoing, but also how ordinary people are experiencing it and how their aspirations are leavened by disappointments. I'm going to now perhaps invite Swati Sivanand, who has several chapters in the volume, to perhaps reflect on forms of everyday or ordinary speculation, which is one of the kind of pivotal aspects of the book.
Swathi Shivanand:Thank you, Vinay. Like Himagini says, the way in which we've worked on this book or on this project has really transformed the way in which we've seen the city that we've grown up in. I would begin with something that is something of a personal note. So, I live in one of the suburbs in Bangalore, which is a small neighbourhood with a middle class neighbourhood. And when my parents built this house, they built it to live in it and not necessarily to earn rent from it.
Swathi Shivanand:We moved into this locality maybe about fifteen, twenty years ago. And that was the dream of a middle class household to own a piece of land and to build a house and to live in it. But as we've seen this locality develop, I was amazed at seeing how everybody was building for rent. Right. So, it's not just a place for a middle class household to build a family, but also for us to earn something from it.
Swathi Shivanand:I never really analyzed it, but I just was just simply an observation for a very long time that I started working with all of you in this project. And particularly the Karmicara colony that or the worker's colony that both Himalgini and Kabi did some fantastic fieldwork in. That's when I really began to see it in this sort of, in scrutinizing and how the idea that land or a piece of land just as small as 1,200 square feet is not simply something of an aspiration, but is also something to speculate on through building. So a second income or even maybe a primary income where you rent out a floor, you rent out a room. And really, think that's what we saw in this karmickerer colony, that that's what people are doing in terms of speculating just on their small piece of land.
Swathi Shivanand:So, it doesn't necessarily need to be something that looks at like, you know, high finance, etc. So, in that sense, what I'm saying is echoes something that Hemangani says about low finance. So, there are always this layer of speculative urbanism, is deeply ordinary, deeply unremarkable, and yet it is all around us. That's something that the book really does a fantastic job of capturing and really is complemented by the sort of deep ethnographic work that Kaviri and Himangani have done. And that's really what I pick up on when I write the chapters.
Swathi Shivanand:Either it could be on leakages of affluence, which looks at the contestation between a somewhat middle and middle class locality and this large gated community that's just adjacent to it. I think the other thing that they really speak about or they've really done some great work on was on looking at this new form of urban occupation, which is the small scale real estate broker. I remember reading Kaviri's notes in which she talks about an interview that she's had with a small scale real estate broker who's just waiting
Kaveri Medappa:for that one deal that
Swathi Shivanand:will set him for life. I thought that was just so fantastic, right? Like we're just waiting for one deal. It may be a receding horizon. It may never happen, but it's there and you're always betting that this might happen.
Swathi Shivanand:So I think that gamble that people are taking, hoping for that deal that will set them up for life is something that I think the book does a fantastic job capturing.
Vinay Gidwani:Thank you, Swati. I think ordinary forms of speculation and how the speculative city that Bengaluru has become also summons speculative subjects, orientations that try to live, survive, and occasionally even perhaps, thrive from the speculative changes, upheavals that are transforming Bengaluru. I know that there are many other stories that you could discuss, and I hope we'll have an occasion to come back to them later in this podcast. But for the time being, I'm going to invite Kaveri Madhappa, who has a wonderful striking chapter in the book based, on her own dissertation research, but Kaveri was a pivotal part of this project.
Kaveri Medappa:As one of the research associates on the project, I was very fortunate to do a lot of the field work, especially in the core city field site. And as I think Himangli put it so well in saying that you don't see the city in the same way now that we've done this research. Even while doing fieldwork in Karmicra Colony and then going to RP Colony, you could see the differences. You could also see the structural change in the economy as lived by, for instance, the residents of RP Colony who were the 60s and the 50s pastoral communities looking after their cows and goats and then moving into this area becoming industrial workers and now their children are employed mostly in the new services economy, mostly low paid services economy jobs and also how their lives are so financialised in terms of depending on rent and rental income. And then you could also see for me was to see the differences between Karmicarra Colony and RP Colony and it's something that this book touches upon so much.
Kaveri Medappa:And what Narasim Murthy's chapter in this book also talks about land, land as being a resource. The fact that Karnikura Colony residents had land sites allowed them to at least build houses and now use those houses as some sort of protection against old age. There are no pensions, there are no stable jobs and so you have at least some sort of asset based welfare going on in Karmicera Colony. But the same thing when you see RP Colony and what happened to it, also an informal settlement, despite being a notified slum, what happened? Now they have multi storey buildings which they cannot really make use of in terms of getting credit or trying to build up or using it as some form of protection for the future.
Kaveri Medappa:And that's what Thingar Simurthy's chapter also talks about so well about the consequence of Dalits being denied or deprived of land ownership. The fieldwork took me to places that I'd never been to. The Purvapur Field site, I had never been to that part of the city despite having grown up and having lived in it for thirty years. So it quite incredible to see those places and also to see the transformations it was undergoing. So yeah, the book's very special to me.
Kaveri Medappa:It's also very special because I can actually send a copy of this book to my parents who are retired bankers who've never been close to an academic book, and they say that they're really enjoying reading it. So far in all my writing, this chapter that I wrote for the book has been probably the most enjoyable piece of writing I have ever done. So thank you again for inviting me to contribute to this book. So this chapter, as Vinay said, is based on my PhD research with gig workers in Bangalore. So I studied mobile gig workers, so mostly Uber and Ola drivers, cab drivers, and food delivery workers in the city of Bangalore.
Kaveri Medappa:And this was ethnographic research. And so whenever I would go to meet the food delivery workers, would always say, Madam, you must do this. And that is the only way you can actually know what we go through. Shadowing was not always possible because it's a very, very gendered occupation. It's wholly male dominated almost.
Kaveri Medappa:And a lot of the men have motorbikes where it's not possible to sit billion because they need to keep their food bags behind them. So to find food delivery workers who are willing to take me and who had those kind of motorbikes where they could put the food bags in front and take me behind. It took a bit of searching. And Ajay happened to be a long term research participant. I met Ajay first when he was protesting against Zomato because Zomato had slashed its peace rates and incentives.
Kaveri Medappa:And I kept meeting him. I remember the second time I met him, he had all these aspirations. And it circles back to what we were talking about in terms of speculative orientations. I asked him I remember asking him, so how long do you see yourself doing Zomato work? And he said, five months, six months max.
Kaveri Medappa:I'll clear off all my debts. I'll have some savings. And then I'll start my own new business. And I said, what new business? He said, oh, you don't know.
Kaveri Medappa:People have become so rich. I have a friend. He used to be a Zomato worker. Now he has this kebab shop. And he sells to Zomato, you know.
Kaveri Medappa:So these were kind of the aspirations that he had and he really trusted that working in Zomato and working really hard, you know. That was also this other phrase that they used all the time, food delivery workers and camp drivers, hard work. And these are conversations in Canada. So they would use these English phrases, hard work. We will do hard work and make enough money to get out of this and start our own business.
Kaveri Medappa:But of course, that was never possible. Six months later, seven months later, he was still doing Zomato, he said, Five more months. Just five more months and I still have some loans. And that, I think, says so much about speculative lives and speculative orientations. The goalpost is always moving and you're always chasing it, but you somehow are never there.
Kaveri Medappa:This one vignette that stands out for me from my day of shadowing Ajay, he kept jumping a lot of signals, going on the wrong directions, etc, just to be able to reach his destination quicker. Because in Zomato and in all these app based forms of work, you're paid by the number of deliveries you do. So if you hit a target, you get a little bit of incentive. And there are many there are multiple thresholds of targets. So he was chasing targets all the time and he was riding quite risky.
Kaveri Medappa:And so I asked him about that and he said, you know, I have to do this because otherwise I'm never going to finish my targets. And then we got to the point where he told me that he hadn't paid insurance on the scooter. And I asked him, Why haven't you paid insurance on the scooter? Because you need the scooter for your livelihood and it's really risky if you don't pay insurance, and especially when riding like this. And I made the mistake of asking him, How much is your insurance premium?
Kaveri Medappa:He said, 2,000. And I said, why don't you save some money from everyday's earnings? Save up to pay your premium. And he was like, wait, I'm going to give you some numbers. Okay.
Kaveri Medappa:So you keep adding those numbers and then you tell me if that's possible. In the chapter, I write about all the numbers he tells me, which is basically his loan installments, his loan payments on his scooter, on his phone, a lot of hand loans that Himangani mentioned. Ajay was also extremely he's really dependent on all these vernacular architectures of finance, so cheating payments, hand loans, etc. And he made me add up all those numbers and the numbers didn't add up. He was living on a very, very small margin.
Kaveri Medappa:His costs were almost equal to what he was earning. I think it showed me how all these discourses that are circulating in the media about how gig workers earn so much money, etcetera, should be really critiqued. And also how people like Ajay, they got into these forms of work because they were promised very high incomes in the beginning. These businesses themselves are funded by speculative investments. Back then, they did not make any profits.
Kaveri Medappa:They were running huge losses, but they gave people like Ajay very high remunerations in the beginning. And then after a couple of years started pulling back on these remunerations. And that is why people like Ajay, their expenses now are more than how much they can earn. But they keep trying to match expenses to their incomes by pushing themselves for longer and longer and longer. Even though Ajay was struggling, he did not leave this job because that promise was still alive.
Kaveri Medappa:He kept thinking, Okay, tomorrow may be a better day, maybe next week if I work a bit harder, if I work a bit smarter, if I wait at the right spots. So that gamification, I think, hooks people into these jobs that are extremely exploitative and can also have very damaging implications and repercussions on one's own body and mental health.
Vinay Gidwani:Thank you, Kaveri. Yeah. I think it's an amazing gripping chapter, and I hope many of you who are listening to this podcast will take the opportunity to read it. It's also wonderful to hear, Kaviri, that your parents are actually able to pick up the book and read it because really that was the aspiration for this book. Right?
Vinay Gidwani:Because most academic books, are read by the usual suspects. And we really wanted to try and put together a public facing book that would be widely accessible and bring some of the findings of academic research to a general audience. And I think the brief, when we set out to write this to everyone, was conceptually informed storytelling. And I think that's what we have really tried to do in the book. It remains to be seen whether we succeeded, but I think that certainly was the desire and the aspiration.
Vinay Gidwani:So that's wonderful. I just wanted to make some clarifications in the podcast for perhaps listeners who are not as familiar with India. So Zomato, which Kaveri referred to, right, is a food delivery platform, a platform business, one of the many that has kind of flourished in India. The government of India, for instance, has been making some rather big and ambitious pronouncements about how the gig economy is going to be the employment generator that's going to provide employment for India's youth. Unemployment in India is a very major problem, and economic and political conundrum for the country.
Vinay Gidwani:I also wanted to point out since Kaveri very helpfully brought it up that in terms of the research design, right, we deliberately chose two disparate sites in Bengaluru. One is really kind of in the core of the city, which is Yashantapura and the two colonies that we call Karmakara Colony and RP Colony. And the other side, which is in on the peripheries of Bangalore, but very quickly urbanizing, is it's it's it's in Southeast Bangalore, which we call Purvapur in the book. The motivation here in erecting the research design in this manner was to be cognizant of the fact that the processes of urbanization that are happening and the upheavals and outcomes of these processes are perhaps different in the core part of the city and in the periphery. And in fact, I think our findings bear that out.
Vinay Gidwani:There are obviously some similarities, but there are also some fairly sharp differences. So I think that's an illuminating aspect of the book. And finally, I'll say that this aspect that Kaveri brought up, which is that Ajay's life, Ajay who is the food delivery gig worker, it's a desperate existence, right? He deals with congestion, with pollution, with rude clients, with canceled orders and so on. And at the same time, there's a conundrum, right?
Vinay Gidwani:Because as Kaiviri was pointing out, there's also kind of a gamification of his life. He almost sort of sees this as a game, hope against hope that somehow, right, he will be able to leverage his toil into a better future. And I think this is the kind of desire that draws many people like Ajay into the gig economy in spite of dealing with incredible hardships. With that, I'm going to invite Michael Goldman, who is one of the co editors of the book, who has worked in Bengaluru for a very long time, not just in the areas that we discuss in the book, but also in the northern part of the city. I invite Michael to share his contributions to the project.
Vinay Gidwani:He has a wonderful interview with two prominent activists in the city, Bhargavi Rao and Leo Saldana. And in general, Michael, perhaps say what you think were the motivations of the book and what you find distinctive.
Michael Goldman:Sure. Thanks, Vinay. Boy, I enjoyed all these stories so much, and this is why we got together. I think the one of the motivations from the book was that the principal investigators, the core group of people, some of whom are right here or all of them are right here, the ones that were more directly linked to the academy, you know, the university, we publish scholarly articles from our discrete projects that come together, under the rubric of of this research project. But as many of you know and listeners included, the academic publications typically are a synthesis and an argument and an analytics that typically, for which there's very little room for stories, for for the lives of people, for the the intricacies and the intimacies that come together to allow the academic to come up with an analytic argument about what's happening, in this case, in cities around the world.
Michael Goldman:So once we had published a whole range of articles, we sat down and realized that, like, most of the ethnographic research and experiences and stories were left on the floor because, you know, in a 8000 word article, you just have to get to the point. And getting to the point undermines the point, which was, you know, what is the lived experience, in this case of Bengaluru and for some of us, more generally, in cities around the world that are being what, some of us call financialized, you know, such that the sup the people who live there have to live under the sort of, tense speculative environment like Ajay, like so many of the people who've just been introduced, through these stories. So I think that so then we came together, we decided to hire research, associates as well as bring back the the scholars that started this project, and we, you know, summoned our collective spirit and say, okay. Let's let's write short, pithy stories, or chapters based on the incredible stories that we've collected. So, the book starts with like the one of the chief architects and the financiers and the developers and as we move through the story, we start off by by explaining through their eyes what their dream and fantasy is of the making of a global city.
Michael Goldman:What is the discourse that is pervasive such that there's a catalyst for all this dramatic change that affects everyone in the city and in the countryside? So so one of the stories that we learn is that the city has become, unlike in other times in history, itself an engine of growth for the country. And this we heard from, you know, from elites in in government and in business themselves and in investors. So our question was really, well, how does that affect everyday life and governance of a city that is itself becoming, in a sense, a factory for for wealth production? And how is that wealth being produced?
Michael Goldman:So a couple things that that so as Emangidi talked about the importance of understanding low finance, we see everything in relational terms, of course, and so low finance is really the undergirding of the element that I studied, which was high finance. So just as the folks in the city are having to scramble just to keep up with home, work, food, and such, you know, what about the large scale investors in the city? So that was the element of this research project that I studied. One of the elements of the stories that we're trying that we tried to manage by listening to people's experiences is what gets destroyed in the process of creating this kind of global city. And it's not just about money.
Michael Goldman:It's also about a lot the the vitality of living and the desire and the value of living in a city where so much of the joy comes from the non monetized part of the living in the city. Okay. So but, of course, what I studied, primarily was, high finance. And so my question was, why would Wall Street firms be interested in investing in a very complex place like Bangalore, investing in their airport or in the in the public transit system or in these luxury residential complexes, office complexes. You know, interesting enough, just as those office complexes grew because so many jobs had been eliminated in North America and Europe as engineers were hired more cheaply in India, the same crisis was happening in the IT sector, while we were studying it.
Michael Goldman:That is, there was a lot of job shedding and unemployment because there were cheaper ways to produce software, in fact, automatizing it. So there was a lot of volatility that was going on in the city. So why would investors come? And I'll just tell one basically pivotal story where it became clear to us and those of us who were doing research, but also by listening to the stories of financiers, developers, bankers, and what have you, is the two thousand eight, global financial crisis. And what's sad about it, of course, is just like what happened in throughout Europe and in United States and around the world was banks collapsed, developers collapsed, but also average people lost their houses, because they couldn't pay their mortgages, because they lost their jobs, etc.
Michael Goldman:What I found which was stunning, which was just one little observation through interviews and also research, was that after the financial crisis was precisely when a lot of Wall Street investors came to the city. At the point at which there was unemployment, lack of spending, inability to finish projects, that was particularly when what they themselves called the vultures began to circle. You know, they themselves explained to me and my colleagues that this was an opportunity. And so it's hard to explain in a podcast, but it's simple logic in Wall Street business model, which is particularly when assets are depressed, where they lose their value, like office buildings, like stadiums, like housing complexes, was precisely when they could come in and scoop it up at a very, very low price and then use their own financial tools to invite middle class investors from Bangalore, India, around the world to buy shares in these housing stocks, to buy shares in these office stocks. And with every dollar that gets invested, a company like Blackstone is able to pull out that profit out of India.
Michael Goldman:So what we saw was tremendous amount of investment and a tremendous amount, in a short term, tremendous amount of profit leaving the city. And it's not just Bangalore. You know, it's not just India. We could sit you could tell similar stories about Madrid, Barcelona, about Detroit, and that's also an important punchline, which is I think you would you will fall in love with the story like you might fall in love with the Charles Dickens novel or what have you. But at the same time, realize that it's a general phenomenon.
Michael Goldman:It's not specific necessarily to this one city.
Vinay Gidwani:Yeah. No. Thanks, Michael. You know, before I go on, I should point out that the person in who many ways was the architect behind this whole project and the book itself is professor Carol Upadhya, a professor emerita at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, an amazing anthropologist, an amazing scholar, and one of the most organized people I have met in my life without whose organizational acumen and really kind of scholarly insights, this book would have never been possible. In fact, I would say the project itself would have never taken off.
Vinay Gidwani:So thank you, Carol. Just want to acknowledge your absolutely indispensable contributions to the book. I also wanted to return briefly to something that Michael mentioned that his expertise has been in how High Finance has participated in the upheavals, particularly the kind of real estate economy that has been such a crucial ingredient in Bengaluru's transformation. And of course, Himangini's chapter then gives us a very different perspective on the ordinary circuits of credit and finance that she calls low finance, which have transformed the city willy nilly from below. And then somewhere in the middle are these circuits that we would call, I guess, regional finance.
Vinay Gidwani:These three different fine forms of finance which operate at different geographic scales, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not, have played a significant role in the real estate economy that has been one of the hallmarks of Bangalore's transformation. So I think one of the distinctive contributions of this book is to think about the different scales and forms of finance that have been part and parcel of Bengaluru's real estate economy. We are only five of us here. There are many other amazing contributors to the book who cannot be here. So I'd like to turn it back to all of you and perhaps add anything that you'd like to on what you find interesting in some of the chapters that we haven't been able to perhaps talk about so far.
Vinay Gidwani:Swati, you have this absolutely amazing story. This is from your dissertation work about Amber. It's a very poignant story of how construction laborers who, in many ways, provide the bodily platform for the the edifices and the high rises and the apartment complexes that now litter Bangalore's landscape. How they have essentially underwritten Bangalore's success story, quote unquote.
Swathi Shivanand:Thanks, Vinay. This is really the other side of the story that Michael was narrating to us. So, all of this investment that's flowing into the city has drawn in people from what we've loosely called the countryside or the non urbanized or the neglected regions of Karnataka or elsewhere in different of India. So, the construction sector is one of the largest employers in the country right now after agriculture. So, one of the most dominant forms of occupation in cities now across India is that of construction.
Swathi Shivanand:In my PhD, which looks at larger discourses of development, etc, I was looking at migration to Bangalore. I studied two sites in Bangalore which were inhabited by construction workers who came from a region called Hyderabad, Karnataka. Here I met Amba who was one of my first interlocutors. Amba was possibly about 60 years old because many of these women don't have the same sense of time and chronology that we do in terms of what year they came here, they came to move to Bangalore. So, it's mostly hazy.
Swathi Shivanand:And so we're not necessarily able to locate the years that they come. So, she was possibly around 60 and she'd been a construction worker for at least twenty years and moved in because her family, her husband, etc. Had accrued debts and it was no longer possible to live there to earn enough to look after her three children. So like many others she moved to Bangalore and started work in the construction industry. Women in the construction industry often are paid much lower than men who are likely to be able to move into the more skilled domains of construction work.
Swathi Shivanand:In the story that I say, it starts with Amber but also moves on to a couple of other younger people, younger men that I meet. These are men who are between 18 to 25, who've all come here to make a quick buck in some ways, like Kaveri's story of Ajay. These are individuals who want to put in hard work, work for some time, and then return to the village or whatever money, whatever they're able to accumulate, they invest back in the village, right? So, to buy a piece of agricultural land or to rebuild a house because they know that their life in Bangalore is unsustainable. It's not that they've come here to settle in Bangalore.
Swathi Shivanand:They will eventually have to move back because it's just not possible to live in Bangalore. With the rent, with all kinds of things. So, it's never a home for them. Amba is one such person who is actually a rarity because you don't actually see women who are out of the workforce, who are still living in Bangalore. But she is able to do so because she has been allotted a home by the Karnataka Slum Development Board, which is a government authority.
Swathi Shivanand:In the time that I was doing fieldwork, even though she was out of work, was stitching these patchwork quilts and making some money out of that while she had her son who used to work in the construction sector. So one of the things that she says, which really stayed with me, so I asked her, Is there no way that you can find work? Because she was out of the workforce. She was not able to find work. So, she had to figure out ways to earn her own money.
Swathi Shivanand:She got really angry with me and she said, Do you think I don't want to work? But the contractor says, Even people that are fitter than you, we're not able to find work for them. How can we find work for someone like you? And then she says, Do I not have a body that needs to be fed? If it is only young people with their fit bodies who deserve to live, what am I supposed to do?
Swathi Shivanand:And I think that's really something that we need to reckon with. Here's a city that's drawing in desperate young people, asking them to give up on their vitality in order to build the city, right? Or in order to service the city. And it offers very little to them. So, they have to return to the village or some notion of a village completely depleted, but having nothing to sustain themselves or having very little to sustain themselves in the village.
Swathi Shivanand:So I think there is something here that moves beyond speculative urbanism, but talks about, refers to the unsettled futures, the title in the caption of the book, right? Speculative lives and unsettled futures. That is something for us all to reckon with in terms of it's not just money coming in, it's not just people coming in, but it's also the kind of vitality that the city demands from its workers. What really do they get at the end of this, I don't know, sacrifice perhaps?
Vinay Gidwani:Thank you so much for that, Swati, because I I think Ambar's story is moving precisely because it also provides a moral critique of the city. And I think it gives us a a way to perhaps acknowledge the unacknowledged debts that a city has to the the this invisible army of workers like Amba without whom Bengaluru as we know it wouldn't exist. So thanks for sharing that. Kaveri, Himangini, are there other aspects that you would like to foreground showcase for the listeners?
Kaveri Medappa:Yeah. I mean, all the all the chapters in the in the book are so insightful. And also, I think one thing that comes out from reading chapters is the paradoxes and the ironies. There are so many chapters that touch upon this as well as the struggles, right? The struggles for space, be it Carol's chapter where we meet Dalit brokers who are sort of vying for space in the peri urban real estate market becoming brokers themselves and saying, you know, if the readies can do it, if the upper caste groups can do it, why shouldn't we be doing it?
Kaveri Medappa:Participating in the speculative economy, but also struggles against the commodification, the financialization of space and infrastructure. You see Usha's chapter about the Bangalore Metro. And it was shocking for me because, you know, again, going back to what Hemangiri and Swati and all of us have been speaking about, we've lived in Bangalore, we've been using infrastructure, but to understand the background of how it actually works, what their plan for monetization is and what their plan for financial sustainability is, which is basically to make retail spaces inside and outside the metro stations. That was really, really shocking and concerning. And yeah, it was it's something that would, I think, stay with me whenever every time I take the metro and I will be talking about that with people who are very happy about the metro and talk about how amazing it is in Bangalore.
Kaveri Medappa:The other chapter that I wanted to briefly refer to, again, I can go on about the struggles because we know about SJK, which Swati is going to probably talk about in a bit. Narasimurthy, the chapter with Narasimurthy and slum dwellers struggles for space in big cities like Bangalore. Vinay's chapter, street vendors, and how they claim space and the ironies of that, right, like when the street vendor who is part of the organizing, well, he's part of the union says, We've been here longer than these middle class residents have been, and yet we are the ones who have become encroachers of space now. Yet we are the ones who are supposed to leave. So I think the book does such a fantastic job of showing these paradoxes.
Kaveri Medappa:And for me, one chapter that really stood out in terms of showcasing these paradoxes and somewhat of a dark humor was Priyanka's chapter on the goddess of the lake, right? When you read that whole chapter about how this goddess Tugalama has been brought to the Purva Pur Lake to contain the ferocity of the water, to contain the abundance of water. And here we are in 2022, 2023 when that research was done, when Dugalamma has to be moved out because that lake is full of sewage water and it's forming and combusting on its own. And how in to bathe Dukalangma or to service her or to worship her. Now we need to put a bore well.
Kaveri Medappa:So these paradoxes and again what Leo and Bhargavi say in their chapter with Michael, interviewing with Michael about the paradoxes, ITBT city, this is a city known for its scientific temperament, etcetera. And yet we have manual scavengers getting into pitfalls and dying, yet we have such an unscientific way of dealing with water, the needs of water, of sanitation. So I think for me, it was these paradoxes and these ironies and struggles that make this book such a wonderful book to read and to understand the city a bit more intimately.
Vinay Gidwani:Thank you, Kaveri. One of the points that you ended on, which is that how Bengaluru, which is sometimes called the Silicon Valley Of Asia, is really turned into something of an ecological disaster. It's a city that was once amply provisioned by water through an intricate system of human made lakes and channels. And Bengaluru, as some of you may know, is situated on a plateau. It's at an elevation of approximately 3,000 feet.
Vinay Gidwani:This intricate system that was built over decades was absolutely critical in providing and and and did a great job of providing for, Bengaluru's, water needs. Presently, because of the unfettered growth that Bangalore has, witnessed, water is, increasingly piped up from the Kaveri River uphill at great cost and doesn't necessarily furnish the city's water needs. But one of the ecological paradoxes of Bangalore now is that because this system of lakes and channels has been decimated, sometimes in many cases built over, we have this paradoxical situation where Bangalore can simultaneously experiences flooding and water scarcity recurrently. So it's a real illustration of how an aspirational global city model can produce these speculative ecologies, which can be tremendously damaging. I wanted to also point out before we forget that the book has short but very insightful forwards, a forward and an afterward.
Vinay Gidwani:A foreword by the historian Janaki Nayar, who's a renowned historian and has written an iconic book on Bangalore's development, and afterward by the geographer Malini Ranganathan, who really kind of foregrounds the caste dynamics of urban transformation in the city. I think we're nearing the end, so I'd like to give an opportunity to Hema Angani to take us towards the close and highlight some other aspects that she would like listeners to be mindful of.
Hemangini Gupta:Thanks, Vinay. So I will say that there are several chapters in the book that really puncture this imaginary of the world city, which is something that planners and bureaucrats and government officials in Bangalore have long held very close. You know, and the implicit promise, I think, of the world city is that it can enable access to a modern middle class life to a greater number of people. Right? And so through many chapters, we really look at how there are intricate cast networks that enable people to sort of build the resources necessary to participate in that world city dream, but also for caste oppressed people that can really prevent them from having access to what is necessary to enter that imagination.
Hemangini Gupta:Whether it's looking at agricultural sites on the city's periphery or looking at sites very much in the center of the city, I think that what the book does very well is to puncture this idea that the world city imaginary is something that is enabling to a large number of people. So I do want to mark that through the book. Yeah. And then I was wondering, Swati, if at this point you want to come in to also talk about other ways in which this world city imaginary has been punctured through organizing and so on. And then maybe I can just say a bit after that about some of the photography and multimodal work that came alongside the project.
Swathi Shivanand:Thanks, Himanshu. I just wanted to not miss this aspect of organizing that's been taking place in the city. So, none of this has gone uncontested, the sort of high finance, state speculation, and the exploitation of waves and waves of migrant workers, etcetera. So, in that context, I wanted to talk about this particular chapter on the slum rights movement, which I think nearly everybody in the book has done interviews with respect to the slum rights movement. This is a chapter based on an interview with Narasimha Murti, who is the convener of something called Slam Janandhu Vana Karnataka, which translates to people's rights movement, slum people's rights movement.
Swathi Shivanand:There are many things that Narasimha Muthi draws our attention to, but I want to talk about two things. In our conversation, he talks about evictions. And for anyone familiar with informal settlements and state violence against informal settlements, evictions is the mode through which states violence against informal settlements takes place. So, talks about evictions and that s been one of the sort of organizing impetus for people s rights movements including slum rights movements across India. And here he but he was referring to something called something like market led evictions.
Swathi Shivanand:And I thought that was the really intriguing part. And so in my interview with him, I probed further to figure out what he meant by evictions, because essentially when he said evictions, it was when Dalit households were being bought out of their houses through what are legal purchases, right? So, Dalit households in slums, etcetera, have been allocated land by the state, but the land grows into real estate gains value. And so they, so they end up selling it and perhaps move out of this sort of prime location or something that something that's become real estate. So he characterized it as market led.
Swathi Shivanand:He characterized it as evictions, which was essentially how which is essentially a forced phenomenon. Right? But he was talking about a market led eviction. And I thought that was really interesting for us to pay attention to in terms of how gentrification may be taking place through legal means, but are perceived when looked at through a rights perspective is perceived as a forced emphasis. The second thing that I thought he that he really emphasized was on this.
Swathi Shivanand:So, for a very long time, what's happened is that the slums rights movements have often asked for ownership of the land. Right. And when I was a journalist back in 02/1926, I covered some of these movements, of these protests and evictions, etcetera. And so, I was familiar with some of the things that he was saying. But I think there's been in the, for about eighteen, nineteen years since I was a journalist, there's been a movement in articulation among within the slam rights movement.
Swathi Shivanand:And which is not just that are demanding for a right to own a piece of land, but also a right to speculate. Right. So, it's not simply that we want ownership of the land and that the state must give it to us because we deserve it, because we are laboring for the city, we're building the city. So that is, of course, a primary argument. But they're also saying that we need this right.
Swathi Shivanand:We don't want you to give us multi storey flats and multi storey buildings because that does not allow us the space to expand. Right? So we cannot go on to build how build more rooms, more flats, more and use that to earn rent. So, or use that to earn income. So there is also an added element to this demand for a right to own a piece of land in the city, which is the right to speculate.
Swathi Shivanand:And I thought that was a really fantastic sort of argument that he was making from a rights perspective to be able to speculate. See, if everyone in the city is able to speculate, middle class people are speculating, if corporate finances are speculating, if large construction industries are speculating, why do I not have a right to speculate? And I think that was that was something that, again, a moral critic, but also a moral claim on the city.
Vinay Gidwani:Yeah. Thank you so much for foregrounding that very important aspect of the book. And I should point out that, you know, what we think is one of the distinctive aspects of the book is that it it brings together the voices of activists, public intellectuals, and scholars. Really, I mean, the city becomes like an onion, and then you peel away the layers. Right?
Vinay Gidwani:And you get a completely different sort of perspective on the city as you peel these layers away. As Kaveri and Himongini were pointing out at the outset, a city that felt intimately familiar becomes unfamiliar, almost almost strange in an unexpected, unsettling way. And I think in the best of ways, that's what scholarship really tries to achieve, right, to estrange and perhaps defamiliarize what seems commonsensical, what seems you know, what what's as given. What's what's taken for granted. So I think this book does that in in an understated way through storytelling.
Vinay Gidwani:But nevertheless, I think the the point is to generate lessons for understanding urban transformations happening in other parts of the world where similar processes are perhaps playing out in historically and geographically specific singular ways. Right? So structural forces that perhaps share similarities, nevertheless, play out in particular ways in in in in specific locations. So the book has, obviously, certain stories that are grounded, cited in the specific location of Bengaluru, but nevertheless, as Michael Goldman was pointing out, offers, generalizable insights, lessons that we can take away and carry away. So perhaps, Himangini, I'll give you the last word, and then we can conclude this podcast.
Vinay Gidwani:But I would invite, listeners if you've been intrigued, if you feel so moved to read the book and to really participate in the stories.
Hemangini Gupta:Thanks, Vinay. So the cover of the book is a montage of four photographs by the photographer Pierre Hoser. Pierre also has a beautiful photo essay in the book called Life in the Speculative City. And Pierre worked with the project for many, many years and has worked with Michael before that on other projects in the city. And I think his photographs really animate the project in incredible ways.
Hemangini Gupta:Two things worth mentioning are that Pierce photographs often work through a sort of paneling where he will focus on like one panel of something much larger. And it's often people in that panel that he will draw your attention to through his photographs. So that what might have been a huge construction site, he'll suddenly bring to your attention the fact that there are four construction workers in the central panel who are in very dangerous positions, building what you might have even missed as part of a much larger scaffolding. And then he also works through juxtaposition by reminding you and by framing his photographs so that you see two elements that don't seem congruent at all, but are in fact very much a part of the city. So you'll see, for instance, huge tracts of agricultural land that are framed by these new apartment buildings that have been built on what was formerly agricultural land.
Hemangini Gupta:Or you'll see a lake and in the foreground you'll see some of the sort of the dead life, the dead aquatic life from that lake. So these juxtapositions are very, very pronounced and they really draw your attention to them. People would come to us when they saw Pierre with his camera. They would want to be photographed or they would want to chat. And so it was wonderful to come to a field site and not feel like you had to approach people who might be reluctant, but instead you would have people coming to you wanting to talk and to share and to sort of engage the camera in very interesting ways.
Hemangini Gupta:In many ways, I think this project has been committed to sort of public scholarship, both in terms of how we presented the research through the exhibition, but also this book itself.
Vinay Gidwani:Well, I'm just going to conclude it on that wonderful note. Yes. Pierre's photographs, I think, are really a striking supplement to the book. And I just want to conclude by thanking the amazing Himangini Gupta, Kaveri Medappa, Swati Shivanand, and Michael Goldman, and all the other incredible people who are not present in this podcast, for the wonderful, lively, and deeply insightful and often, poignant chapters that, are part and parcel of this book. And I hope, and I invite you once again to, pick up a copy and read Chronicles of a Global City.
Vinay Gidwani:I think, you will find it worth your time. So thank you for listening to us, and, bye bye.