speculative urbanism and the making of the next world city

Speculative Urbanism and theMaking of the Next World City

MICHAEL GOLDMAN

Abstractijur_1001 555..581

This article explores the process of making Bangalore, India into a ‘world city’ byfocusing on specific world-city projects, the parastatal government agencies managingthem, the explosive IT industry as the putative engine behind this world-city making,and the inter-urban dynamics across world cities such as Dubai and Singapore. Most ofthese activities are linked to the highly remunerative challenge of transforming ruraleconomies into urban real estate. Land speculation and active dispossession of thoseworking and living in the rural periphery, on land upon which the new world-cityprojects are being built, is the main business of government today in Bangalore.This article suggests that this temporary ‘state of exception’, with both its attendantsuspensions of civil and human rights as well as their institutionalization intogovernment practices, reflects a shift into new forms of ‘speculative’ government,economy, urbanism and citizenship.

Introduction: ‘India Rising’1

‘India Grapples with How to Convert its Farmland into Factories’, declares a headline toa US newspaper article (The New York Times, 17 September 2008), deftly summarizingthe principal tension running through the urban periphery of much of Asia today, with thesubheading suggesting that the ‘peasants’ have become the final obstacle preventingIndia from attaining globally integrated economic prosperity. As 70% of India’spopulation thrives on rural economic relations, this roadblock to the globalization dreamseems fairly substantial. In this article, I propose a different framing of urban–ruraltensions as they flare up within the context of ‘world-city’ making.

I would like to thank Wesley Longhofer, Vinay Baindur and P. Rajan for their excellent intellectual andresearch support; Professors Gopal Karanth and Supriya RoyChowdhury of the Institute for Social andEconomic Change (ISEC), and Professors Carol Upadhya, Narendar Pani and A.R. Vasavi of the NationalInstitute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in the Indian Institute for Science — Bangalore (IISc), and therest of the NIAS professors, graduate students, staff and its director, for the creative and supportiveenvironment in the center of town; and the exceptional and generous scholar Professor SolomonBenjamin, as well as scholars R. Bhuvaneswari, Lalitha Kamath and others who have helped meenormously. Thanks also to Sinan Erensu, Guillaume Boccara, Heather O’Leary, my colleagues at theUniversity of Minnesota, particularly in our inspiring Global Cities collaborative, as well as audiences andcommentators at UC Berkeley, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Michigan, DickinsonCollege, South Asia Conference at University of Wisconsin–Madison, Hamline University, St. OlafCollege, Duke University, Newcastle and Northumbria universities (UK), Madras Institute forDevelopment Studies (Chennai), Tata Institute for Social Studies in Mumbai, and the Centre for Internetand Society in Bangalore.1 ‘India Rising’ is the public relations theme that stands for the ‘fantastic’ (as well as real)

transformation of India as a global force.

Volume 35.3 May 2011 555–81 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.01001.x

© 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and BlackwellPublishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St,Malden, MA 02148, USA

From my ongoing research on Bangalore —Asia’s self-proclaimed ‘Silicon Valley’anda model for world-city making — I focus here on how rural communities havebeen thrown into the center of world-city making and how the process of dispossessionreshapes the state. Is this merely a transitional, speculative, exceptional moment, or is thestate initiating a set of dynamics that puts the majority under a type of rule of law that canbe called (to borrow from Giorgio Agamben, 2005) a lasting ‘state of exception’? Sincemost world-city projects require land from the city’s rural periphery, how is this practiceof ‘conversion’ of the rural into the urban affecting class and community social andeconomic relations, and new subject conditions? If, as the official argument2 goes, India’sintegration into the global economy depends upon new forms of industrialization (in andthrough the information technology revolution) and urbanization (by creating world citiesas anchors of innovation in production and governance), what is the role of the state(‘India’) in this transitional ‘grappling’ phase of urban-space making? Do these changesreflect a new mode of spatial and social production in cities? Are the imperatives inbecoming a world city motivated by logics and desires coming from specific sectors ofindustry or finance capital (cf. David Harvey), from distinctive forces of urbanization (cf.Henri Lefebvre) or some other dynamics? This article argues that the exceptional rulesof dispossession enacted in the name of world-city making are creating a new art of‘speculative government’, new anxieties differentially experienced across class,community and place, while also redefining state relations, urban citizenship, rights andrules of access.

Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor and the global-city theorists emphasize how global cities,as the home for the rule-makers of global capitalism, are unique spatial configurationsgenerating socio-spatial dynamics geared toward extending and reproducing the powerand authority of transnational elite social and corporate networks (Sassen, 2001; 2006;Taylor, 2003 and the GaWC — Globalization and World Cities Research — network,available at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/).3 But in pursuing the question of how thesetheoretical arguments bear out in the case of what they call ‘second-’ or ‘third-tier’ global(or world) cities, one finds that this impulse to fit cities into a multi-tiered hierarchyglosses over significant social dynamics occurring within and among lower-tiered ‘other’cities (Simone, 2001; 2004a; 2004b; Robinson, 2002; 2006; Benjamin andBhuvaneswari, 2006; Benjamin, 2008; Roy, 2009a; 2009b). In Bangalore, one finds anumber of phenomena working below the radar of the global-cities analytics, some ofwhich are worthy of consideration.

First, alongside the much-acknowledged international finance institutions (orIFIs, such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank) facilitating urbantransformation are the much less scrutinized ‘transnational policy networks’ influencingand implementing new urban projects, bringing together local administrators withEuropean GIS (Geographic Information Systems) consultants, Southeast Asian buildersand good governance NGOs (Goldman, 2005). Second, in conjunction with the shrinkingrole of certain old bureaucratic actors are a new fleet of powerful ‘parastatal’ agenciescarving out new terrains and configuring technologies of power through legislative fiatsunder the rubric of ‘eminent domain’ for the public good, as well as through informaleveryday practices of land encroachment, lower-class people’s dispossession, and

2 The ‘official’ argument reflects the dominant ‘liberalization through urbanization’ agenda ofthe Indian government which, as this article shows, is cultivated, sponsored and legitimatedby transnational policy networks comprising officials/consultants from the World Bank, AsianDevelopment Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers, chambers of commerce, and elite international urbanplanning programs and fora.

3 In popular discourse, the highest echelon of world cities are often called global cities; amongstscholars, there are more specific distinctions. ‘Global’ is often a signal of a high density of globallyrelevant activities by international forms of capital, whereas ‘world’ has an older usage and oftenconnotes a worldly cultural distinctiveness (e.g. Athens, Cairo).

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.3© 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and BlackwellPublishing Ltd.

cross-class and community power-brokering. And third, a new architecture of capitalrelations has emerged in Bangalore that is not only similar to transformations occurringin other cities across Asia with world-city ambitions, but is also linked through inter-urban relations across these cities. The ‘Singapore model’ of governance, the ‘Shanghaimodel’ of infrastructure development and the ‘Bangalore model’ of IT growth flowacross major Asian cities as swiftly as do large amounts of finance capital and pools ofill-paid labor, most of which is driven by one form of speculation or another (Ong, 2007;Business Standard, 2008; Ong and Li, 2008; Press Trust of India, 2008).

In Bangalore, the daily work of city government has changed considerably, nolonger the glacially slow-moving bureaucracy of jokes and lament. As the city plansits geographical expansion over the next two decades (having expanded from 226 km2

to 696 km2 recently, with ambitions to expand to 7,000 km2 over the next few decades,hoping to become one of the world’s largest megalopolises — see Figure 1), the newlyempowered and internationally debt-financed parastatals oversee the rapid expansionof the city boundaries, the congealing of rural governments into a world-city one, andprojects of land acquisition, airport and highway construction, housing townships, andnew water and sanitation infrastructure. Most of these activities are linked to thetangible and highly remunerative challenge of transforming rural economies into urbanreal estate. How can we understand this recent state obsession in India with real estatespeculation? How can we explain the political rationality of active dispossession inthe name of world-city accumulation, and the political formations that emerge frompersistent interactions between vulnerable citizens and emboldened government actorsfocused primarily on land acquisition? Land speculation and active dispossessioninside and surrounding the city of Bangalore is the main business of its governmenttoday. The anxieties of high-rolling speculation not only affect people’s ability to holdonto their living spaces, but also their jobs, identities and communities. Living in aworld city like Bangalore today becomes a highly speculative, and dangerous,proposition.

Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (117 sq. kms. )

IT Corridor (113 sq. kms.)

Bangalore International Airport (est. 28 sq. kms.)

Pre-2007 city boundaries 226 sq. kms.

BANGALORE (696 sq. kms.)

Figure 1 Bangalore’s growing world-city projects (source: graphic adapted by WesleyLonghofer using information from Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari, University of Minnesotapresentation, May 2008)

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore 557


A natural trajectory?In rethinking Bangalore’s transformation, it is useful to start by asking from where thisspecific impetus of contemporary world-city making came: how did certain discursivestrategies emerge to assume dominance, while many other alternative planning narrativesbecame ‘provincialized’? What are the formative connections within India, across otherworld cities, and between Bangalore rural and Bangalore urban; how might these socialrelations eclipse previous development mandates and, more importantly, livelihoods andsocial relations thriving in spite of development mandates?

Initially, Bangalore did not shift into world-city mode as part of a larger moralpanic to refashion the Third World ‘mega-city’ teeming with uncontrollable violence,wrenching poverty and fetid living (Srinivas, 2001; Hansen, 2005).4 Until the ITexplosion of the 1990s, Bangalore was a comfortable middle-class town with secureunion jobs in large public-sector research and manufacturing firms that fed into thehigh-end functions of the Indian state and economy (e.g. radar and satellite systems,telecommunications and space research, manufacturing equipment). A few years intothe IT boom, Bangalore was not ‘burning’ or a planet of slums. Instead, firms such asTexas Instruments asked for substantial upgrading of Bangalore’s pleasant but small-town public facilities in order to survive in the fiercely competitive global IT sector(Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005; interviews with author, 2006–08).5

Bangalore’s largest employers, many of which started in the early 1900s, were BEL(Bharat Electronics Ltd), HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd), ITI (Indian TelephoneIndustries), HMT (Hindustan Machine Tools), BHEL (Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd),Mysore Industrial and Testing Laboratory and Mysore Lamps Works, which alongsidethe nation’s top science institutes, such as the Indian Institute of Science (previouslythe Tata Institute), produced the ‘first wave’ of India’s IT revolution in the 1950s, inaeronautics, space research, radar and remote sensing, military equipment and factorytoolmaking (Vyasulu and Ready, 1984; Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005; Upadhya andVasavi, 2008; interviews with author 2006–08). Bangalore’s urban landscape hadbeen shaped by the housing and industrial colonies for these plants and their workers andmanagers, with English-speaking schools, housing colonies, health clinics, shoppingareas, bus lines, parks and community centers where local organizations meet. AsBangalore-based economist Narendar Pani (2009: 117) writes: ‘These townships [sinceincorporated into Bangalore city] covered hundreds of acres of land each, and in the caseof the Aircraft Township of Hindustan Aeronautics, 2,847 acres (Nair, 2005: 89). Theseunits attracted workers of varying skill levels from technologists to unskilled labour. Astrongly unionized labour force meant that the lowest paid public sector employees fitted

4 There are many versions and discursive genealogies of this moral panic scenario, in which thedire conditions of the ‘Third World’ megacity must be addressed, or else: most recently fromthe sympathetic Left, such as Mike Davis (2006) and Robert Neuwirth (2004) and a morecomprehensive library from Malthusianists such as The Population Explosion by P. and A.H. Ehrlich(1990), and international institutions, including The Challenge of the Slums by UN-Habitat (2003),State of the World Population: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth by UNFPA (2007), and theWorld Bank’s (2008) World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography.

5 This phenomenal high-growth IT sector emerged from Bangalore, India’s longstanding ‘science city’,due to a significant historical conjuncture: India’s 1991 economic crash (as remittances and oilstopped flowing from the Gulf as a result of the first Iraq war, requiring that India ship its goldreserves to London’s banks to back its huge foreign debt) empowered a small cadre of formerhigh-level IFI officials led by the current PM Manmohan Singh to create India’s economicliberalization policy. Barriers for capital and commodity flows across India’s borders fell, whichcoincided with Western firms’ concerns about the potential crash of its computers, seeking Indianengineers to solve its enormous, but tedious, Y2K problem. Once inside Western firms, Indianengineers realized the simplicity of the routine data-management work that curried good salariesfor Americans and Europeans, and suggested that by employing Indians, firms could cut costs bythree-quarters. A dramatic global shift ensued.

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easily into the lower middle class of the rest of Bangalore. The children of all publicsector workers then had access to Bangalore’s English based technical education’.6

The phenomenal growth of India’s recent IT revolution led to the arrival of the world’smost profitable and innovative IT firms, plopping themselves down in cow pastures,spinach fields and drained irrigation tanks (small lakes) on the southern and easternoutskirts of the city. Since most of what the IT sector produces is software coding anddata management, all of which can be transported globally via satellite and fiber-opticcables, firms could function and prosper on very little urban infrastructure(Parthasarathy, 2004).7

Ironically, it is only since the mid-1990s, through the actual process of makingBangalore into a world city, that Bangalore developed ‘mega-city problems’ rife withrapidly escalating social inequality, mass displacement and dispossession, proliferationof slum settlements, increased caste- and religious group-based violence and tensions,and epidemic public health crises due to severe water supply and sewage problems (inworking-class neighborhoods). Roads are extremely congested and vehicles generatesuch high levels of pollution that many motorcyclists travel around with bloodshot eyesand respiratory problems. How did India’s ‘garden city’ and ‘pensioners’ paradise’become such a world-city nightmare?

The making of a world-city discourseThe key movers and shakers for urban transformation in India’s largest cities includecoalitions of local business elites (such as the Confederation of Indian Industry andNASSCOM, the software industry’s chamber of commerce), professionals from the IFIsand bilateral aid agencies, non-resident Indians living abroad (NRIs), internationallyconnected NGOs, along with India’s elite urban bureaucrats and officials. Their approachoverlaps with other globally circulating efforts promoting a ‘master plan’ agenda,often promoting a single sector of the economy as an engine of rapid accumulationthrough large infusions of external loans and investments for 24/7 world-class urbaninfrastructure (see PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2005; 2007). Their discursive convergenceis expressed in a number of networking and deal-making events, such as one I attendedat the Taj Exotica Hotel in the beach resort of Goa in February 2007. Capturing theconfessional sentiment of a newly transnational-oriented bureaucratic elite during thefirst international conference on Indian cities sponsored by the EuroIndia Forum, asoft-spoken city commissioner from the city of Jaipur in northwest India took the podiumand gave a short speech which I paraphrase here.8

Thanks to these types of meetings and experiences and conversations, I have begun to see myhome city differently. When I look out from Jaipur’s main railway station, I can see makeshifthuts with women cleaning dishes and children playing and grazing their animals, the dhobiswashing clothing, the small food carts setting up for the day, people meeting the call of nature.I have always seen this as a typical city scene in India, the way it has been and will always be.But why couldn’t we build right along the station a line of nice hotels, corporate centers and

6 Nonetheless, according to Janaki Nair (2005), services were provided within these industrialcolonies but not to the neighborhoods that built up around them, which reflected the class- andcommunity-based limitations of public service provisions.

7 As the story goes, the customs agents, so used to receiving a bribe from all goods shipped in and outof India, demanded that Indian IT firms ‘show’ their goods being exported, and in the first few yearshad to also put their work on CDs so that the agents could get their fair cut and be sure that thewhole profitable sector was not some hoax.

8 A chamber of commerce-type organization designed for Western Europe’s and India’s big-citymayors and firms promoting their consulting, real estate, tourism and high-end service sectors(http://www.the-euroindia-centre.org/Content/Default.aspx).



shopping malls? Now I can imagine that Jaipur too can become a world city that can generatejobs and money and bring in tourists and make the city and its people much more productive.From this view, our cities are full of untapped value and potential, making them a very excitingplace to be.

These comments reflect more than one individual’s cultural epiphany, as one finds suchconfessions, revelations and logics in presentations from PricewaterhouseCoopers staff,in bureaucrat training courses, urban planning exercises, international fora on ‘urbanfutures’ and in Asian Development Bank loan portfolios. Together, they reflect asequence of events unfolding over recent years in India (and further back), which canbe summarized in the following way. First, the career trajectory of an ambitiousadministrative civil servant has changed, such that it is now imperative that one’strack-record should include training programs on making cities globally competitive, runby international agencies (at the World Bank for the better socially networked, or thoseat the Hyderabad-based Administrative Staff College of India’s Urban Managementprogram, originally designed by the World Bank Institute).9 Second, local governmentagencies now bid for international finance loans and grants, always accompanied byconsultancies from transnational policy networks (e.g. PricewaterhouseCoopers), hiredto design and manage these large dollar loans (and debts). Third, the central governmentof India has initiated its own world-city investment strategy, J. Nehru National UrbanRenewal Mission or JNNURM, channeling more than US $11 billion to cities that bid fora slice of this money (over 7 years starting from 2005–06), with conditions attached thatencourage corporate partnerships between foreign service providers and public goodsmanagers in state agencies, borrowing capital from international markets and financingdebt through municipal bonds, and other steps that convert these small bureaucraciesinto competitive and ‘responsibilized’ agents (Rose, 1999) of new urban financial andgovernance norms.

Converting what Hernando De Soto (2000) called zero-value ‘dead capital’ intohigh-value ‘liquid capital’, city officials have embarked upon a new way of managingthe ‘public’: worlding through speculation and liquidation. This adjusted aperture allowsobservers to participate in the business of imagining the transformation of old citymarkets into central business districts, clusters of small shops and street-vending localesinto downtown shopping malls, and irrigation tanks and village fields into glass and steelcorporate campuses of the business world’s new Googles (Shrivastava, 2008). There ismuch to be gained and much that will change in this process of envisioning change, evenif much of these plans are never realized. The World Bank/De Soto approach attributeseconomic stagnation to the failure of the ‘command-and-control’ state to nurture freedomof investment and the entrepreneurial spirit amongst the whole population, right downto the ready-to-be-unleashed ‘poor’.10 This urban modernization approach argues thatrural peasants need not continue to play the static role of urban salesmen, pushing oldhandcarts selling pitiful bundles of vegetables and herbs; peddlers, vendors, beggars and‘slumdogs’ also desire an opportunity to leverage their participation in city life andcapitalize on the transformations of city economic life. The poor should expect morefrom their cities, and these globally integrating projects are precisely the vehicle to meetsuch expectations. Following from this global-city logic, rural communities can be morethan mere suppliers of (cheap) city food products, but also landlords and providers ofhigher-end services to world-class IT engineers, which is what many of these world-cityprojects on the outskirts of Bangalore promise.

9 A 2009 workshop on strengthening urban management, co-sponsored by the Administrative StaffCollege and World Bank Institute, featured modules such as ‘Creating Creditworthy Cities and UrbanSystems’, ‘Good Urban Governance and Decentralisation’ and ‘Change Management’.

10 See the World Bank’s (2008) World Development Report: Reshaping Economic Geography, and theBank’s urban strategy website: http://www.wburbanstrategy.org/urbanstrategy/; see also AnanyaRoy’s (2010) critique of treating the impoverished as if they were capital.

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For metropolitan areas working closely with the IFIs, the 1990s became the decade ofprivatization bravado.11 Mega-cities approached public health and capital-scarcityproblems by raising foreign capital through international auctioning, turning agedand under-financed infrastructure into something that could provide world-class 24/7European-style service. In the process, local government bodies would be radicallyreshaped. Across the urban global South, the size of this public-to-private shift in the1990s has been world-altering: to just take the example of water privatization, only ahandful of city dwellers in 1990 purchased their daily water from European firms; yet by2000, more than 450 million urban ‘customers’ had been created and analysts havepredicted that by 2015 up to 1.5 billion people in the global South will be converted.12

(Customer growth for electricity, telecommunications and garbage services fromEuropean firms would follow.) For a brief moment in those heady days for Vivendi,Bechtel, Enron and other rapidly consolidating and expanding high-end global servicefirms, Casablanca (Morocco) was the experimental site for the new world city: withWorld Bank funding and conditionalities, Northern firms hoped to bundle the needs of amiddle-class household into one-stop service — cable TV and internet, telephone, water,garbage, electricity and sewage all delivered by one firm to middle-class Southern homesin ‘world-class’ European style.13

On the heels of this urban services revolution, the next stage of IFI-fueledprivatization evolved into world-city making, based on the following logic: why nottransform the whole service-provisioning system, more than just the water down the pipeor the electricity across the urban grid, but the whole system of urban infrastructure andits management, including all the ‘open’ and ‘untapped’ land in between and belowthis under-utilized urban infrastructure? Acres of ‘under-utilized’ or dilapidated publicinfrastructure reflected thrice-ignored capital reserves: ‘dead’ infrastructural capitalsitting on ‘dead’ land capital overseen by ‘dead’ managerial capital. The idea broughta renewed vigor to city officialdom, as if city leaders had discovered oil reserves undercrowded open-air markets, debt-burdened farming villages and their own office desks.14

Speculative governanceOne key condition (and opportunity) levied by the IFIs and endorsed by India’s centralgovernment was the mandate to reform public agencies into ‘single window’ one-stopshopping sites for the expedited approval and disbursal of permits and foreign capital

11 In the early 2000s, the World Bank ran an eBay-type auction website in which it advertised andauctioned public goods and infrastructure, from Ugandan railways to Honduras garbage-collectionservices. Although that site is no more, it still has a number of active sites — and loans — whereprivatization of public sectors is encouraged.

12 See reports by PSIRU, such as Water Multinationals in Retreat 2003, Aquafed 2006 and PublicSolutions to Private Problems 2003 (available at http://www.psiru.org), and Goldman (2007).

13 The deal collapsed as the non-middle-class majority caught on that its basic goods were beingauctioned to France to serve the local elite and by 2004, remarkably, most of the metropolitanwater deals around the world were scrapped due to widespread social protest, which in some LatinAmerican countries (such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay) turned rapidly into progressive politicalchange (PSIRU, 2006; Goldman, 2007).

14 Besides the motivation to cultivate a synergy with these high-end service firms, the World Bank hasits own reasons to support this shift to world-city building. A consequence of the anti-privatizationresponse to its policies has been a widespread ‘disinvestment’ from the World Bank by nationalruling bodies, such that by the mid-2000s, the Bank and IMF were losing their client base acrossLatin America and what the Bank calls its middle-income countries of Asia. However, it found asource of new clients through its direct lending to weak urban local bodies, ill-equipped to take oninternational loans and incur international debt, and to parastatals designed by IFIs for the task.Both types of urban entities were new to the practice of borrowing internationally for debt financing.



projects, ostensibly blending efficiency with good governance, ditching the slow-churning and much-maligned Indian state bureaucracy (Fuller and Benei, 2000; Harrisset al., 2004; De, 2006; Harriss, 2006; Shaw, 2007; Baindur and Kamath, 2009). Bothcontributing to, and undermining, a national turn in Indian government in the mid-1990stowards decentralization and democratization (the passing of the 73rd and 74th

Amendments to the Constitution in 1993 to decentralize power from state-levelauthorities to rural panchayats and urban municipal authorities), many of Bangalore’skey government agencies are newly empowered parastatals, accountable only toKarnataka’s chief minister and the international lending agencies that finance them.15

The sole elected urban local body (ULB) for Bangalore, Bruhat Bangalore MahanagaraPalike (BBMP) or the city corporation, is comprised of corporators (or city councilors)elected from the 198 wards of the city. But because of the 2007 city mandate to expandthe city’s limits to include seven surrounding towns and 103 villages, thereby tripling itin size, the corporators have been suspended since September 2006.16 As the onlydemocratically elected body in Bangalore, their responsibilities have always been quitelimited, responding to complaints from citizens about storm drains, solid wastemanagement, roads, schools, stray dogs and health services.

By contrast, the most powerful city agencies are those shaped and financed byIFIs: the Bangalore Development Agency (BDA) overseeing the ComprehensiveDevelopment Plan; Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development and FinanceCorporation (KUIDFC) set up by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the WorldBank (WB) to oversee their funds; and Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board(KIADB) which negotiates land acquisitions for mega-city schemes. The world-cityproject-based parastatals include Bangalore International Airport Area PlanningAuthority (BIAAPA) and Bangalore–Mysore Infrastructural Corridor Area PlanningAuthority (BMICAPA). Parastatals are unique in that they depend largely upon externaland project financing, and have little or no local oversight, being directly accountableonly to the lenders and to the Karnataka chief minister, a party-elected official(Chamaraj, 2009). Hence, decentralization and local empowerment have not led todemocratization; on the contrary, attempts to bring democracy to the town or cityhave been undermined, whereas the internationalized development technologies ofvoluntarism and civil-society participation have temporarily triumphed (Benjamin andBhuvaneswari, 2001; Nair, 2005; Ghosh, 2005; 2006a; 2006b), as we will see below.

Three significant institutional shifts have occurred in the governance arena: first, asBaindur and Kamath have astutely noted through their research, most of the key WorldBank and Asian Development Bank recommended policy reforms on urban governancehave been subsequently instituted as requirements for access to their loans, as well as tothose offered by the central government’s main lender to cities, the J. Nehru NationalUrban Renewal Mission or JNNURM (Baindur and Kamath, 2009: 28). Starting in 2001,IFI recommendations have included the repeal of the Urban Land Ceiling RegulationAct, phased reduction of stamp duties, phase out of rent control laws and indexing rentsof municipal properties to market rents, unbundling of municipal services to createuser charge revenue streams for each public service, rapid increases in tariffs for waterand utilities, and the introduction of double entry accrual accounting. All have beenincorporated into JNNURM guidelines for urban local bodies, and have shaped thecreation and work of new urban parastatal agencies. These reforms are separatinghistorically weak government agencies overseeing very small maintenance budgets fromnewly autonomous agencies; the latter have become swollen with large budgets and yet

15 These parastatal agencies reflect a broader trend of building what PricewaterhouseCoopers (2005)consultants call ‘democratic capital’, or establishing various public–private partnerships in an effortto enhance accountability and civic participation. See also Chamaraj (2009).

16 Elections were not even on the horizon as of October 2009, and only under judicial pressureoccurred in April 2010. See Mathew Prasad Idiculla (2009) ‘Why BBMP elections are not happening’.

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also made much more volatile, as their work is defined by high risk multi-million dollarinternational loans and large-scale obligations of debt finance.

Second, expert commissions and task forces have since 1999 played a critical role, asan institutional apparatus that could ‘meet demands that the present system of electedcorporators [or city councilors] does not adequately fulfill’, and to ‘help citizens make“informed and effective decisions that truly represent citizen’s priorities”, a direct call to“take ownership and get to participate in governance” ’ (Nair, 2005: 15). That apparatuswas the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), a 15-member nominated body of eliterepresentatives from the IT and biotech industries (such as Infosys CEO NandenNilekani) and the business community (such as Naresh Malhotra of KPMG–Bangalore),plus NGO leaders (such as Ramesh Ramanathan, a former Citibank trader from NewYork who started Janaagraha, and Samuel Paul, a former World Bank official fromWashington, DC and director of Public Affairs Centre, both of whom have played a leadrole as citizen-participation/government watchdogs in town). Before its closure in themid-2000s, the BATF office and many of its initiatives were funded by Nilekani’s privatefoundation, Adhaar Trust, which also offered seed grants for entrepreneurial projectsthat would help BATF’s main initiatives: Swachha Bangalore, or Clean Bangalore, andSwayam Ghoshane, or Self-Promotion (Heitzman, 2004: 103; Ghosh 2005).17

BATF hoped to be the citizen-based vehicle for depoliticized, audit-based, anti-redtape urban initiatives. It wanted a no-nonsense approach to urban development, basedon the Singapore model of cleanliness and efficiency. Its biggest success was itsconstruction of well-adorned bus stops and clean public toilets in select sites. But theirattempts to institutionalize the ‘task force’ approach to governance met with resistancefrom citizen-group protestors as well as civil service suspicions. Whereas BATFwas started by the newly elected Congress Party’s chief minister S.M. Krishna, whounabashedly wanted to turn Bangalore into Singapore, BATF’s successor, ‘ABIDeBengaluru’, was started by BJP Party’s chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa, once he waselected in 2008, with its members from the BJP Party, senior government and industryofficials, along with Ramesh Ramanathan from Janaagraha again.18 One of their flagshipprojects might be a 60 km monorail system (Times News Network, 2009). Althoughspecific task forces seem to come and go with each election as Janata Dal (Secular),Congress and BJP parties exchanged the reins of power over the past decade, the trendof placing elite corporate and citizen leaders in positions of power to circumvent existingforms of government decision-making seems to have stuck in Bangalore, much as it hasin Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi (Chamaraj, 2009).

Third, citizen action groups such as Janaagraha and Public Affairs Centre (PAC), ledby ex-IFI and Wall Street professionals, have been working under the premise that onlywhen citizens participate — by shaking things up, looking under the rug and taking thelead in moving projects forward — will Bangalore become a world city (see PAC andJanaagraha websites — http://www.pacindia.org/ and http://janaagraha.org/). Socialaudits are a key technology for forcing government agencies to become more transparentand responsive. Samuel Paul’s PAC created the ‘citizen’s report card’ — opinion surveysasking consumers to rate their public utilities and service-delivering agencies. PACpublicizes the results, engages in dialogue with the respective agencies and mobilizes

17 BATF focused assiduously on what scholars researching different Indian cities call ‘middle-classurban aesthetics’ attempts to eliminate some of the more unpleasant ‘culture of poverty’characteristics of Indian cities that hold them back from world-city aesthetics: omnipresent smellsof urine and unsightly slum ‘muck’ (Ghosh, 2005; Baviskar, 2006; Ghertner, 2008).

18 ABIDe stands for Agenda for Bengaluru Infrastructure Development. It is also, of course, an acronymthat expresses professional-class frustration with the way the urban majority does not follow therules and aesthetics of cosmopolitan world cities such as Singapore, and comfortably slides into thecultural expectations of Hindutva urban culture (i.e. the Hindu nationalist claim on the proper wayof being a Hindu). In other words, moralistic class, caste and religious-group tropes have saturatedthe rhetoric of elite voluntarist civic campaigns.



middle-class professionals to push for better services. PAC has run high-profile publicfora for English-speaking professional-class audiences, and worked closely withparastatals and the IFIs to ensure that its citizen constituents are heard in world-cityproject proposals. Attracted to this form of citizen activism, the World Bank and AsianDevelopment Bank have since hired Paul and PAC to consult on their behalf in world-city initiatives across Asia and Africa. India’s central government has hired Ramanathanand Janaagraha to promote citizen participation across India.19 By 2008, BATF hadvanished and been replaced by BJP-led ABIDe, Ramanathan and most of Janaagraha hadshifted to Delhi to undertake citizens’ participation work for JNNURM’s 64-city lendingprogram, and Paul and PAC had reduced their Bangalore work while becoming moreinvolved in World Bank consulting abroad.

How are these rapid turnovers in government and governance affecting the runningof Bangalore? Do we see a deepening of democracy through IFI-financed highly efficientparastatals, eminent-citizen task forces, citizen NGOs demanding accountability andparticipation? Well, the mandate to expand and extend Bangalore outwards hasinfluenced the decentralization/democratization process in one very concrete way. Inone village absorbed by the expanding IT corridor on the eastern side of the city, itspanchayat leader once represented 300 households as a representative elected by hisfarming neighbors; his office has been replaced by a city corporator, a well-connectedpolitician-cum-real estate broker who now represents more than 30,000 people, whichis the typical ratio for newly aligned city wards. Now that his vegetable-growingcommunity has been consumed by IT corporate enclaves, this political position hasgained considerable value in the new marketplace of world-city politics. Whereasfarmers in the villages and trade unionists in the working-class urban neighborhoodsdominated these localized elected positions less than a decade ago, today these seats areworth tens of millions of rupees to the highest bidder as the political hierarchy and realestate industry melds together (perhaps temporarily).

At the same time, parastatal agencies set up to oversee world-city projects haveusurped the small-time service-maintenance government agencies. Elite task forceshave become the ‘deciders’ and professional-class government watchdogs have risen(and fallen) in their roles as citizen agitators for better urban services and amenities.Cumulatively, one can see a shift in the institutions of governance. New grand schemeshave always come to India’s prized cities (the Commonwealth Games in Delhi forexample), and Bangalore historically (with its many high-profile science/technologyprojects) has been no exception. For the first time, however, these world-city projects areredefining the art of government, with state–citizen relations becoming shaped by theculture of neoliberal speculation. The next section highlights the emergent geometry ofpower of mega-world-city projects and its institutional effects on the art of government.

Reterritorializing through world-city projectsThis section briefly traces three urban mega-schemes currently being executed: theBangalore–Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) (see Figure 2), the IT corridor, andthe Bangalore International airport and its surrounding development area (BIAL), tohighlight prevailing worlding practices (John, 2005). The international airport, whichopened in May 2008, was built and is being run by a consortium led by the Unique ZurichAirport firm and Siemens, receiving highly subsidized land from the government 35 kmsnorth of the city, extensive enough to build 2.5 Heathrow (London) airports. The ITcorridor on the city’s eastern periphery is yet to be fully built, on land not yet fully

19 Paul’s Report Card technology has been replicated for many Bank loan recipients, including thePhilippines and Gambia (see World Bank webpage http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/.html).

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acquired; planned to be 1.5 times the size of Paris, it will be subsidized by thegovernment with the help of a Singapore-based firm. Although intended to have its ownlocal government, it would tap into Greater Bangalore’s refinanced power and watergrids. The IT corridor and airport will be connected by a world-class monorail builtto transport IT professionals back and forth between airport and work, flying above thetraffic jams and nuisance of the city below. Throughout the expanding metropolitan area,the international finance institutions are lending for major water and sanitationimprovements, road upgrades and expansions, and the ‘professionalization’ of thegovernment sector with new laws, regulatory bodies, staff training and e-governmentsystems. (One such project is the ‘bhoomi scheme’ of computerizing land records tofacilitate the creation of so-called efficient and liberalized rural–urban land markets.)The IFIs are not funding every scheme, but by financing the newly crafted regulatoryapparatuses and essential provisions (such as water and electricity), their workprofoundly affects them all.

Following the model of regionalized expansion, the Bangalore–Mysore InfrastructureCorridor (BMIC) intends to redirect development away from Bangalore in order toalleviate urban density in the interior and expand the overall space of Greater Bangaloreto include new and old townships, small cities, village clusters and agricultural land.Operated by a US-based investor, NICE (Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises,aka Bangalore–Mysore Infrastructure Corridor — BMIC), this project starts with theconstruction of a six-lane privately owned toll expressway between Bangalore andKarnataka’s second-largest city, Mysore. The 130 km-long expressway will become acatalyst for regional urbanization, with NICE building five new private townshipsand multiple industrial parks on agricultural, village and forested land. The project’sadvertised main goals are to reduce the travel time between the two cities from three anda half hours to 90 minutes, thereby alleviating the crowding of Bangalore’s IT sector andallowing it to expand geographically. In 2005, Mohandas Pai, then director of humanresources at India’s major IT firm Infosys (with large campuses in both cities), said in thepress: ‘It’s the single most important project for Bangalore. It will not only provide moreemployment, but also improve the quality of life of the people of Bangalore’ (IndianTollways, 2008).

At an estimated cost to date of more than US $1 billion, the 7,000 acres requiredfor the toll-based expressway will be surrounded by another 21,000 acres on whichNICE can develop these new townships, each affiliated with a corporate center, industrialcenter, farming/marketing center, ecotourism center or heritage center, preservingin a museum setting the rural way of life that the thoroughfare and malls may pave over.

MYSORE

BANGALORE

INDUSTRIAL CENTER

CORPORATE CENTER

COMMERCIAL CENTER

HERITAGE

CENTER

OUTER PERIPHERAL ROAD

ECO-TOURISM

CENTER

EXPRESSWAY

Arkere

Mandya

MaddurChannapatna

Ramanagaram

Bidadi

Srirangapatna

Cauvery River

Shim

sha

Riv

er Arkavati

River

SH86

SH17

NH4Ring Road

NH7

SH17

Figure 2 Proposed BMIC highway and its Special Economic Zones and private townships(source: graphic adapted by Wesley Longhofer using information from the NICE, Ltdwebsite)



Besides reducing travel time, it will also denude up to 7,000 acres of forested land anddrain eight lakes. The government chose to lease the land at a controversially low priceof Rs 10 per acre per annum (in 2009, Rs 47 equaled one US $1).

While the toll expressway will be owned by the government after the 30-year leaseexpires, the townships created along the road will be privately owned and managed;it was not the thoroughfare, but the ‘unleashed value’ of converting rural Karnataka intourban real estate that was the ingredient which attracted the US investor, and one ofIndia’s largest corporations (Anil Ambani’s ADAE), to the scheme. Just as New York,Singapore and Dubai real estate firms are winning bids to set up their own townshipsoutside India’s cities, in 2007 a Dubai firm closed a US $15 billion deal (with DLFof Delhi) to build, own, operate and govern a prototype township known as ‘KnowledgeCity’ on 9,000 acres surrounding the town of Bidadi, alongside the plannedinfrastructural corridor (see Forbes, 2007b). In other words, the rural economy leaves thefarmers few options but to sell their land at depressed prices to the government, evenwhile the same land brings in astronomical sums of capital from around the world.

Since there are no vast ‘open’ spaces out there to build upon, land must be acquiredfrom rural denizens, many of whom are engaged in agriculture and live in villages. Fora developer to receive 28,000 acres from the state government, states have industrial areadevelopment boards (in Karnataka it is KIADB) charged with the task of purchasing landfrom rural owners and villages, building up basic infrastructure — i.e. water, electricityand in some cases a physical plant or campus for an auto factory or software company —and then selling or leasing it to businesses. By and large, Indian farmers are not allowedto sell agricultural land for non-farming purposes, ostensibly to preserve the nationaltreasure of farmland and protect vulnerable farmers from land ‘vultures’ preying onthem. This is especially true for the lowest caste communities that have received landunder land-to-the-tiller programs since the 1970s. (Of course, the existence of this landceiling and land reform legislation does not preclude such things from occurring, and theWorld Bank has pushed for repeal as a condition of its urban reforms loans.) In this case,more than 200,000 rural people will be displaced by this Mysore–Bangalore corridorproject — people who farm the land, live in the villages and work in rural service andsmall-industry sectors supporting the regional economy.20

Under the law of eminent domain, based on the British colonial Land Acquisition Actof 1894, government can acquire land from farmers if it is for a project that is forthe ‘good of the nation’, but it must offer a fair market price (see D’Rozario, n.d.). TheKarnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB), however, offers a relativepittance to the non-elite members of rural communities, exercising its right to choose thedepressed rural market price and not the upscale world-city market price as its marker.The difference comprises ‘the rent’ that shapes and fuels the new urban economy and itsgovernance structure: the black, grey and white markets of real estate brokering andspeculation, the mega-deals conjured for new highway, special export zone (SEZ) andtownship construction, and the new governance system ‘managing’ these transitionalsteps toward becoming a world city. One of the significant bones of public contention isthat the original plans and contract with the Bangalore government apparently did notinclude these non-highway real estate projects, and is being disputed in the courts and bylandowners refusing to let the government acquire their land (Saldanha et al., 2007).

The rationale for offering farmers such a low price relative to land’s new urban valueis based on the belief that many of Karnataka’s farmers are now relatively poor, in debtand deemed uncompetitive. But this is true less because of the failure of the land, thepeople or the crippled rural economy, and more because of the post-1991 liberalization

20 Leading the opposition against the project is the Environmental Support Group, a Bangalore-basedNGO that dubbed the BMIC the ‘Enron of road development’ (http://www.esgindia.org/campaigns/bmic/docs/BMICP%20short%20note.htm). See Leo Saldanha (2007) ‘A nice road goes dangerouslyoff-course’; see also the hundreds of pages of raw documentation about BMIC ‘irregularities’ on thewebsite http://www.hiddentruthofbmicp.com).

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shift in priorities by the government in price supports from the rural to the urban servicesector. Whereas in the past the government would subsidize agriculture in order to keepboth a national food surplus and some of the 70% of the nation’s population engaged inrural work employed and compensated (some political moments have been better thanothers), policy since the early 1990s has shifted from rural subsidies and supports, andaway from social welfare provisions in general. In other words, world-city investmentsdepend upon the widespread disinvestment from other local economies, such as thediverse rural and the urban informal. Significantly, most of the urban and rural populationworks for the multi-faceted ‘informal’ economy (including textiles, apparels, silkprocessing, mechanical fabrication, plastic parts manufacturing, floriculture, foodprocessing and a varied service sector), which employs most of the population andgenerates between 55 and 75% of Bangalore’s GDP (Benjamin, 2000a; 2000b; 2008).Yet, world-city projects, with their large appetites for under-valued/capitalized land, tendto undermine these small and medium-sized enterprises, as the latter’s political clout hasdiminished by comparison.

This historical convergence of neoliberalization and world-city urbanization hasempowered the new parastatal agencies such as KIADB to become brokers of large-scalepublic and private land transfers. World-city brokering has become the biggest growthsector for the regional economy.21 The management of this land acquisition process hasbecome the main source of revenue and wealth accumulation in Bangalore today, and themain political tussle amongst the political parties and the parastatal agencies.22 In thelengthy and laborious process of master planning, mapping out the specific plots ofland to be acquired, notifying the landowners and handling the land users (i.e. workingthrough the complex web of uncertain landownership rights that often include distantrelatives and also generations of non-own land users), and of course the final purchaseand subsequent transfer to the investors, a lot of money exchanges hands.

Whereas profit rates in IT have dropped by half since 2006, and have sunken moredeeply since the 2009 financial crisis, the real estate sector continues to grow skywardsas it becomes transnationalized. The real estate market in India has grown at 30% peryear since the mid-2000s and was estimated to grow by three and a half times by 2010(from US $12 billion in 2005 to US $60 billion in 2010) (Shrivastava, 2008), but hasdropped substantially in the second half of the year. Unitech, one of India’s largestreal estate firms, reported a 3,190% increase in net profits from 2006 to 2007, and itsmarket capitalization grew 11,561%, according to Assocham (the Associated Chambersof Commerce and Industry of India).

When so much capital floods an industry that requires access to large plots of land,whole new dynamics unfold. In the case of the expanding IT corridor on the southeastperiphery of Bangalore, one finds villages such as Bellandur caught in the eye of thisstorm. In 2002, many of Bellandur’s small-landowning farmers refused the price set by

21 Parastatal agencies were created during the burst of large investment capital flowing in during the1960s and 1970s from international finance institutions, which wanted to create parallel agencies not‘corrupted’ by local politics and stuck in the perceived inertia of local bureaucracies. They alone couldfloat municipal bonds and borrow internationally. They were (and remain) not beholden to anyconstituencies except the state’s chief minister and the IFIs that created them. Hence, parastatalscreated their own bureaucratic culture and politics of IFI capital flows and access to privilegedgovernment resources. Since the liberalization of the early 1990s, and the latest rise of the real estateindustry, these parastatals have increased their local power demonstrably, as this article shows.

22 Remarkably, some of the key beneficiaries of these land transactions have been the new class of realestate moguls. In acknowledgement of the fact that the market value and legitimacy of thesecontentious land acquisitions are often determined, in one way or another, through politics, thebiggest winners from these land deals have quickly entered politics. In the 2008 state-wide elections,23 of the 30 local MLAs (legislators) elected to represent Bangalore received much of their recentwealth from the real estate industry. A decade or so back, when such land deals were not a possibility,many of these MLA positions were filled by trade unionists, farmers’ union activists and progressivepolitical party leaders (interviews with author, 2007–08; see also Merinews, 2009a).



KIADB, as their land was fertile, highly productive and alongside a large lake thatsupplied fish and irrigation water plentifully (interviews with author, 21 May 2008);and for many of the landowners, the fast-growing IT sector promised high prices for theirfarm and village land. But those prices were not guaranteed. At that time, the marketprice ranged from Rs 40 lakhs (1 lakh is Rs 100,000) to Rs 1.5 crores (1 crore is Rs 10million) per acre (roughly from US $100,000 to US $375,000), and yet KIADB agreedto sell 100 acres (a substantial amount in local terms) to the Indian IT firm Infosys at amuch lower flat rate of Rs 9 lakhs (US $22,500); in turn, KIADB offered the farmerseven less — ranging from Rs 3.5 to 6 lakhs per acre (interviews with author, 21 May2008). This triggered a storm of protest by farmers, and eventually was picked up thepress, farmers, activists and politicians. (One village filed a claim with the High Courtwhich awarded those farmers Rs 58 lakhs per acre, still a small fraction of the marketvalue but almost ten times more than what KIADB offered.)

Over time, many farmers living in the vicinity of the IT corridor being developed havesold off their farmland because of pressure from KIADB, and from the developersoffering a better price to expedite the land acquisition process (as large investors awaitedto purchase consolidated land tracts). (Village inhabitants who do not have land deedslose out completely.) Although as recently as a decade ago, Bellandur farmers profitablyproduced cauliflower, spinach, rice and coconuts for Bangalore city markets, the acutedensification of the area by IT firms has rendered its main water source — the oncemajestic Bellandur lake (the largest in Bangalore) — unusable for farm irrigation,contaminated by the untreated toxic industrial and household waste that flows into it(Rediff, 2005; The Times of India, 2006; interviews with author, 21 May 2008). As thenew IT thoroughfare cuts right through the village’s farmland, and as individual plotsof land were sold piecemeal to developers or the government in order to construct ITcampuses, farming has become untenable.

In the case of the Bangalore–Mysore Industrial Corridor (BMIC) heading south toMysore from the southern edge of Bangalore, few public records exist, but a loose-knitgroup of farmers’ organizations and NGOs representing the disaffected have documentedthat a similar process occurs there.23 It is estimated that only a small fraction of the ruraldenizens notified by the KIADB will be compensated, and compensation will be farbelow market prices. Many will not be compensated for various reasons: portions of therural population have difficulty proving ownership (especially women and the poor), as16 different documents are required to prove landownership in a context in which muchland is under village or common ownership, and therefore not recognized as valid forcompensation. Moreover, plenty of villagers do not own land even though they maylease or be employed by or work on someone’s (or common/village) land. Some workwithin the villages as tradespeople, religious workers and overseers of shrines and burialgrounds, midwives, shopkeepers, pastoralists, barbers, cobblers and so on. Those whomaintain Indian village life are not necessarily landowners. Land tenure relations inKarnataka reflect deeply historical, localized, multi-layered and intergenerational sets ofinformal agreements that have made it possible for laborers, village denizens and smallproducers to live (many in the most fragile way) and absentee landowners to prosper(Benjamin, 2000b; Benjamin et al., 2007).24 Reducing rural life to two cut-and-driedcategories of landowners and non-owners, with only the former worthy of compensationarising from land acquisition for big urban projects, is to further undermine the social andcultural complexity and livelihood strategies of the rural.

23 Political party rivalries have volleyed (substantiated) accusations of large-scale land-grabbingschemes at this project. My colleagues have been conducting interviews in some areas of thecorridor, as have staff for the Environmental Support Group (ESG) and farmers’ organizationsgathering data for court actions.

24 Historical land-tenure relations have come under recent scrutiny through the creation of SpecialEconomic Zones throughout India. According to the Delhi-based Citizens’ Research Collective, morethan a million people, mostly agricultural laborers, face eviction as a result of nearly 240 SEZs beingapproved since 2005 (report available at http://www.sacw.net/Nation/sezland_eng.pdf).

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Those who will be compensated will not be so justly, as dozens of court cases andprotests in the area suggest.25 Since the promotional world-city literature on ‘cities of thefuture’ sell social imaginaries, let us too imagine a different scenario: imagine that in thename of development and India’s rising, the 200,000 people who live in the way of urbandevelopment were given market value for the land in exchange for their lives beingupended — i.e. not the depressed land price (such as the Rs 10 or 25 cents per acre peryear offered to NICE by KIADB on lease) but the market price that gets generatedonce Dubai and US real estate firms began to invest their capital. Then the major ‘value’component of the scheme — making real estate — would be socially dispersed amongstthe rural denizens. Farmers and non-deed-holding villagers alike could own smaller plotsof land along this new expressway to set up shops or small apartment complexes, own ashare in the factories and the new townships. Conceivably, they could enjoy a share of theprosperity of these new projects. Their children could afford to build a solid house, owna small business, go to school and be trained in areas other than poorly remunerativework. But then the road builder, US-based NICE, would be ‘reduced’ to the roleof a public-like agency, producing improved infrastructure, housing, transport andcommercial sites, and generating income and public spaces for the majority to use.It may sound like ‘development’ in some abstract romanticized sense, and certainlywhat the rural poor deserve as their rightful share of ‘India Rising’, but this is not howworld-city-style development unfolds. Without these forms of high-risk speculation andhighly rewarding capital accumulation, neither institutional investors nor IFIs seeminterested.

In the case of the international airport, the Unique Zurich Airport consortium hasreceived highly subsidized land from the government in order to build a ‘world-class’international airport 35 kms north of the city (Businessworld, n.d.). While KIADB fixedthe price of land surrounding the airport at Rs 88 lakhs per acre in 2006, it insists thatfarmers sell at Rs 9.40 lakhs per acre, which are extremely small sums in the context ofBangalore’s world-competitive land markets. One protest is being waged by Dalit (thelowest caste community) leaders, since Dalits were given some of this land less than 20years ago to right historic wrongs committed against them (interviews with author, 2June 2008; Gandhi, 2009). According to the 1970s Karnataka Land Reforms legislation,they are not even allowed to sell this land for themselves, as they are required to use itfor agriculture.

Similar to the BMIC toll expressway, it is not the airport with its one runway that willbe the profitable investment: land is not being acquired for the Unique Zurich consortiumto build numerous runways to compete with the world’s largest airports, but to transformthe land surrounding it into high-value gated residential communities, seven-star hotelcomplexes, ‘medical tourism’ hospitals, and business centers.26 Whose land is beingpurchased or taken for these world-city transformations, and with what effect on the localeconomies (especially the de-subsidized rural and farming sectors), are key questionsthat the development industry and world-city boosters have largely ignored. They arealso avoiding the possible causal connections of mass dispossession with the alarmingrates of suicide among farmers in rural Karnataka and the growth of slums populatedwith displaced rural farmers and workers (Sainath, 1996; 2007; 2008; Vasavi, 1999).

The ‘unleashing of value’ for investors purchasing the land around BMIC and the newairport made conditions for the struggling rural and peri-urban communities much more

25 My ongoing research with colleagues in Bangalore includes documenting these grievances along theBMIC, in the international airport area and along the IT corridor, following up on the work of farmers’groups and NGOs mentioned in this section.

26 A 2008 news report ‘discovered’ that even as contractors were receiving subsidized (or stolen) landon which to build a number of ‘state-of-the-art’ private hospitals for elite tourists wanting expensivesurgery procedures for a fraction of the price back home, only one of Bangalore’s public hospitalshad an intensive care unit, with just five ICU beds for the entire city.



volatile.27 Those with greater social capital have organized civic organizations to raisetheir voices about the bad air, noise, traffic, congestion and dirtiness of the city, feedingcomfortably into the justification for world-city projects and the promise of European-style urban amenities. The majority express their concerns about the growing volatilityof life in Bangalore through slum-, farmer-, Dalit-, and trade union-based actions of asubdued yet persistent nature.28 Their anxiety over expropriation as world-city ambitionsspread is palpable in diverse forms of political anger and action. Some of this politicalanger has been taken out on Muslims and ‘non-locals’ from Kerala, Andhra Pradesh,Bihar and Tamil Nadu, even though these people have been tightly woven into the livedhistories of Bangalore for a long time. In sum, Bangaloreans of all backgrounds mustbecome speculators of one sort or another, taking extreme risks and gambling on whengovernment agents or land brokers (or violent nativist organizations) will tag theirpossessions next for acquisition. Many feel they must act before it is too late.

We are all brokers nowIn an interview, one reputable Bangalore journalist describes an emerging pattern of‘land churning’, propelled by young men on scooters approaching desperate farmers whoreceive land acquisition notices from KIADB:

They’re descending on these farmers like locusts. During the day they’ll come and offer thema price for their land, already not providing them enough to survive, and by night someone willcome and offer them a ‘great deal’ on a plot of land in Bangalore city itself. And you can’t tellme the guy by day and the guy by night aren’t working together. So farmers are being cheatedfrom all sides. The government refuses to support them through fair-market prices as KIADBforces them to sell at below-market prices, and the real estate guys and developers via theirgoons want the land so they can turn it over for a hefty profit. After all, these local ‘brokers’also imagine they can get a piece of the action, they too want to send their kids to engineeringschools like the elites and get IT jobs, not understanding that most are lowly BPO (call center)jobs that can’t sustain a family. Meanwhile, the actual buyers are working for a senior ministerin Delhi or the chief minister in Karnataka. In other words, there is a long chain of actorsparticipating, and everyone is implicated. Where does the money (from all this land churning)go? Often it can go into joint ventures between a son of one state minister making money offreal estate speculation and an IT entrepreneur who needs cheap land. The grey money filtersthrough the new IT firm, through a new chain of cafes opening up to serve the new middle class,and everyone looks good (interview with author, 10 March 2007).29

It is no coincidence, therefore, that in the latest budget plan for the ‘cosmopolis’Bangalore, two-thirds of the money will be allocated solely for road building, includingan imagined ten-lane highway, never before seen in India (see Merinews, 2009b). This isfor a city where more than two-thirds of the population walks, rides a bike or scooter, ortakes public buses to work, according to city transport engineers. As real estate brokershave explained to me, for each and every new regulatory land law passed over the past

27 Organizations such as CIVIC, Alternative Law Forum, Environmental Support Group, CASSU, andvarious slum dwellers’ associations have criticized mega-projects like the Bangalore–MysoreInfrastructure Corridor and the new airport due to contestations over fair compensation for landacquisitions and risks to the environment. The funding structures of these projects also threaten thefinancial sustainability of cities starved of funds. The centrally funded JNNURM project, whichprovides large grants to cities for infrastructure development, risks pushing municipalities intofurther debt as they take out loans to fund the required 50% of matching funds (see CIVIC’s‘JNNURM — A Critique’ at http://www.civicspace.in/research).

28 For more on how unions and traditional forms of solidarity and class organization have dissipated inBangalore, see e.g. RoyChowdhury (2008).

29 This story seems to be common in the villages surrounding the new international airport and alongthe outer ring roads, where colleagues and I are conducting research.

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few years in order to free up ‘dead capital’ buried within unproductive public andpoor-people’s landscapes, a flurry of money-making opportunities have been createdfor government actors. From the realtors’ perspective, government agents are the onesswindling the farmers, and there is plenty of evidence documenting this pattern,including routine news reports of land-grabbing scandals, often documented bylegislative and court-ordered inquiries; the largest ‘land-grabbing’ scandals are blamedon senior government and party officials.30 One real estate broker explained to me hisreading of the situation: every new law enacted to protect people from being swindled outof their land sets off a whole new set of bribes that deed holders must pay in order to workthrough the newest layer of regulation, having to pass yet another threshold of the (newlycontrived) land bureaucracy mafia.31 So much money flows from these land transactionsthat the three major political parties are now dependent upon this cash, and less likely toaccuse the other of land grabbing.

As successor to the British, the Indian government inherited a colonial landscape inwhich it controlled the vast majority of land in and around Bangalore, including morethan 80 lakes, major thoroughfares, green belts, parks and boulevards, large militarycolonies and parade grounds (Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005). Until the late 1980s,state offices earned their incomes from an array of petty forms of rent collection andmaintenance fees; today, in stark contrast, state agents earn their keep (and then some) byturning public (and private) goods into real estate, and real estate has become highlyremunerative largely due to this ‘worlding’ of the Indian city. Two notable features of thishistorical conjuncture are the phenomenal rise of a new transnational corporate sector(including IT) and the proliferation of interactions among Asian world cities that hasfueled a speculative (‘plug-‘n-play’) climate for super profits across capital-rich worldcities such as Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Bangalore. Thespeculative state tries to adapt and cash in, but in India there follows behind a maelstromof speculative capital swirling through its cities, destabilizing and reorienting the socialand spatial conditions of government. According to Assocham, the Indian real estatemarket is expected to reach US $90 billion by 2015 (up from US $14 billion in 2008).Meanwhile, foreign direct investment in Indian real estate is anticipated to increase byUS $30 billion in the next 5 years. In the third quarter of 2009 alone, more than US $7billion of foreign direct investment flooded into the latest instrument for foreignspeculative capital in India — urban infrastructural funds set up by Morgan Stanley,Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group and DE Shaw, owners of the (bailed-out)hedge and derivative funds that crippled the global economy in 2007–08.32

30 See, for example, the legislative report that created controversy in 2006, ‘Joint LegislatureCommittee on Encroachment of Lands in Bangalore Urban District’. Here is an excerpt from thedocument: ‘The BMP, BDA, CMCs and the Cooperation Department, to name a few (governmentoffices), have utterly failed in their duties to protect government and public lands and havebecome not only helpless, tolerant witnesses but in many cases their officials have also becomeactive participants, abettors and promoters of these crimes (which include the theft of more than8,000 acres of public land). For instance, the Principal Secretary, Revenue Department declaredbefore the Committee that as many as 300,000 bogus Records of Rights have been issued bycolluding Revenue Staff [emphasis in original] . . . At this rate, Bangalore will become infamouslythe Land Grabbing Capital of India while so far it has been known as India’s Garden City, IT City,Science City and Silk City’ (report translated from original Kannada).

31 This perspective becomes less controversial only within a context in which something like a realestate market, relatively new in India, has quickly become naturalized as a legitimate source ofcapital accumulation; by contrast, many people forced off this land see the real estate brokers asgoons and swindlers.

32 As a completely new investment strategy in 2009, Morgan Stanley with partners set up a US $10billion urban infrastructural fund, Goldman Sachs a $7.5 billion fund, Citigroup and Blackstone a US$5 billion fund, and DE Shaw a US $1 billion fund. Note that these are promises made in pressreleases and not necessarily actual commitments.



As Bangalore’s world-city master plan calls for the incorporation of hundreds ofvillages and towns on its periphery in order to meet its ambitious growth targets for thenext 10 or so years (if achieved, Bangalore will become the third-largest megapolis inthe world), it is becoming clear that much more money can be made by turning ruraleconomies into urban real estate for world-city projects than whatever money can bemade from the actual projects themselves (BBMP, 2009). Hence, Bangalore’s newworld-city economy is based less on the supposed engines of growth than these world-altering ones. Looking into the business plans of India’s miraculous IT sector reveals itsactive participation in a core speculative dimension of world-city making.

The IT engine of growthTransforming Bangalore into a world city depends on the rather large assumption that itsextraordinary IT sector will become a permanent growth machine, and as such can be thecollateral for these large loans and long-term investments in urban infrastructure(Parthasarathy, 2004; Dittrich, 2007). With that in mind, it is useful to better understandwhat fuels Bangalore’s IT sector and how the major IT firms (e.g. Infosys, TCS, Satyam,Wipro) are re-investing their surpluses and ingenuity. Are they, as the World Bank andPricewaterhouseCoopers hope, providing exceptional leadership, innovation and thetelematicization of governance — the world-classing of the cities of India? Morefundamentally, will they be here tomorrow, when the projects are complete and the billsfall due for payment?

The dream team of Indian IT started from humble entrepreneurial origins: a fewyoung talents offered Californian computer firms an attractive outsourcing propositionduring the Y2K crisis. They could hire Indian software engineers at a fraction of the costof US and European ones, and fix the Y2K problem before the turn of the millennium.As one of its managers has explained to me, India’s premier firm, Infosys, offered to dothe tedious job, promising it could pay its workers US $15 per hour and not the US $30per hour which US firms were paying its local engineers; the fledgling Infosys insteadpaid Indian engineers US $2 and kept US $13, and made millions instantly. Infosyseventually took on other mundane tasks for Northern banks, insurance companiesand health firms, coding and data processing on the night shift and cutting the local feestructure substantially. Since the mid-1990s, Infosys has had 40–45% revenue growth peryear, tapering off to half that in 2007. In 2005, it employed 40,000 workers, doubling to88,600 by December 2007. Infosys maintains its global market share in every one ofits divisions, including Finance, Banking, Aerospace and Defense, Media, Environment,and Insurance.

Infosys grew quickly, from a small US $75 million firm, to a US $2 billion firm in2005, US $3 billion in 2006, and had expected to grow to US $10 billion by 2010, but hasslowed to US $4.8 billion in 2010 due to the global downturn. Although the largestcompetitor is IBM Global, which had revenues of approximately US $40 billion by themid-2000s, its profit margin is at 15%, whereas Infosys had a 46% margin in 2005, albeitsinking to 28% in 2007 (and much lower by 2009). Only a small percentage of the firm’swork is BPO or call-center work, most is customer analytics, payroll processing andback-office work; for some US firms, Infosys has taken over as much as 70% of theiractual work. For mail-order companies (such as Amazon), insurance, financeand credit-card companies, whose main tasks are data processing behind the scenes,Bangalore has become an offshore boon.

As to the question of how much IT firms invest locally, aside from their 70,000–90,000 person workforce and their high consumer spending, these firms are not activeinvestors or innovators. Although world-city advocates argue that IT firms could usetheir computers and telecommunications to support new systems of state-of-the-arte-governance — transparent, democratically accessible, efficient and competitive — the

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reality is quite different. As one interviewee explained, today 98% of Infosys’ work isbusiness from outside India, and 65% is US-sourced. Accenture and IBM Global are itsmain global competitors. ‘Our offshore rates are too high for local Indian clients, and wemake our large profit margins from the difference between our local costs and whatWestern companies are willing to pay’ (interview with author, 21 February 2007). Wecannot afford to hire ourselves to local governments, he explained, and governmentagencies really have no use for what we offer.

Instead, surpluses are invested in mergers and acquisitions of competitors in Europeand the US. In early 2008, Infosys invested in two major mergers and acquisitions inEurope and Australia to increase its market share and reduce competition, and becomemore vertically integrated into more arenas of business. Flush with cash during theeconomic downturn of 2008, Infosys was, according to the business press, looking to buymore undervalued/underperforming European firms (see Vencat, 2008).

Domestically, IT’s main investment is in real estate, which has now surpassed IT itselfas the most profitable industry in India. As competition stiffens in the global IT industry,the most lucrative place to invest IT surpluses has been in land: converting cheap (byinternational market standards) public and undervalued private or community land intoreal estate. Land values have skyrocketed: prices for floor space and per foot plots of landin the central business district increased 160% between 2001 and 2006 (from Rs 2,500to Rs 6,500 per square foot).33 One of Infosys’ strategies has been to buy up land in andaround Bangalore, Mysore, Chennai, Chandigarh, Pune, Hyderabad, Jaipur and outsideDelhi, creating what it calls high-value ‘land banks’. According to the 2006 AnnualReport of Infosys, ‘creating land banks was a key challenge’ of the year.34 Besides the79-acre main campus with pool, golf, amphitheatre, hotel and more than enough officespace for expansion, they also banked 357 acres near the international airport, 845 acresin Sarjapur on the outskirts of Bangalore, 315 acres in Mysore with a bowling alley andcricket stadium, and 100 acres of paddy fields in rural Bangalore.35

Infosys is not alone. Once the fourth-largest Indian IT firm, the darling of Hyderabad(‘Cyberbad’), Satyam’s chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted to police in January 2009that he had set up 275 real estate holding companies in the names of his family membersfor handling numerous land transactions while lying in Satyam’s accounting books aboutmore than US $1 billion of non-existent assets.36 While Satyam worked for more thanone-third of the Fortune 500 companies in 66 countries, including the World Bank, mostof its surplus has been diverted to real estate deals throughout Andhra Pradesh, with closelinks to the chief minister and large development projects related to Hyderabad’semergence as India’s next world city. In a recent public confession, former chairmanRaju said he had set up this out-of-control scam not for private gain, but as the only wayhe saw Satyam could be globally competitive (Aaftaab, 2009).

There are a few other noteworthy trends in land-use patterns emerging from the ITsector. First, most foreign IT firms are no longer purchasing land for campuses but areleasing ones built for them through government initiatives and subsidies. Second, andrelated, the number of SEZ (Special Export Zone) applications for IT office parksis increasing (of the 20 SEZs notified in and around Bangalore since 2005, 13 are forIT and IT-enabled services, totaling some 865 acres of land), which means that evenmore public money, land and resources are being funneled to offset the start-up and

33 ‘Real estate at a surreal price’, CNN/IBN, 27 March 2006 (available online at http://www.ibnlive.com/news/real-estate-at-a-surreal-price/7366-3.html).

34 Infosys’s Annual Report 2006. For an excellent discussion on the IT industry and its land banks, seeSrinivasaraju (2008).

35 Another strategic move by Infosys and others is to invest in their own offshore production siteswhere labor and operating costs are lower; in the Philippines, for example, hourly wages are half theBangalore rate.

36 ‘PwC auditors admit to fraud in Satyam case’ (Asianewsnet, 2009); ‘Satyam chief admits huge fraud’(The New York Times, 7 January 2009).



maintenance costs for IT firms to settle (even temporarily) in and around Bangalore. Astime goes on, IT firms are demanding much more in the form of public support thanever before.37

In Bangalore, three-quarters of IT firms lease, and rental space prices more thandoubled from 2005 to 2008 in software parks where companies have been allowed tomove so as to qualify for tax-exempt status. As one set of tax breaks expires, others areset up due to threats by foreign firms to move out. The proactive government has recentlyapproved sites for 13 SEZs in Karnataka and 11 in Bangalore, with a very attractive taxholiday for leasees. According to Kaustav Roy, Cushman & Wakefield India directorin April 2008, firms would move from STPs (Software Technology Parks with theirexpiring tax holidays) to SEZs (with their new long-term tax holidays), perhaps withinBangalore’s newly extended city limits.38

Up until 2008, Indian IT firms were paying very little in corporate taxes (withpractically no tax obligations for foreign firms) and the IT sector growth together withIFI-financed mega-city schemes spurred land values upwards, in some quarters by morethan 900%. With Bangalore’s planners and lenders arguing that, in order to overcome itsmega-city problems, Bangalore needs to construct its world-city projects on the ‘under-utilized’ land of the city’s old center (where working-class Tamils and Muslims live) andits rural periphery (where farm workers and farmers live), the vulnerable majority arebeing alienated from the streets and public and shared plots of the city. The social effectsof world-city planning in this case exacerbate already tense social divisions as publicspace and lands shrink in size, use and access.

These contradictory processes are unfolding differentially on multiple scales: betweenurban and rural Karnataka, across the real estate markets of Mumbai and Delhi, and, innew ways, through elite inter-urban networks across key Asian cities. On the one hand,large sums of capital are financing urban infrastructure and office and residentialconstruction. For what seems to be a historic first, new townships being built outsideBangalore are being owned, developed and governed by real estate and constructionfirms from other world cities: Dubai (Limitless Properties), Singapore (Asendas PteLtd, CPG Consultants, Singapore Piling & Civil Engg Pte Ltd, Jurong Consultants,Keppel Land), the US/New York City (Starwood Capital Group, Coldwell Banker,Cushman & Wakefield, Morgan Stanley) and Delhi (DLF Building).39 On the otherhand, inter-urban speculation coupled with pressure from the World Bank and AsianDevelopment Bank for new liberal technologies of government and security areincreasing anxiety and conflict (Duffield, 2001).

37 One clear form of public subsidy is the SEZs (special export zones). As of 2008, the total areaunder SEZs in India is approximately 200,000 hectares of arable land. Some of these, such as theMahaMumbai SEZ, are the size of small towns (in this case, 100 km2, or the size of Chandigarh).Though accurate displacement numbers are difficult to come by, most estimates indicate a loss of196,000 farming households and farm-worker families, or about 1,000,000 people. The amount ofagricultural incomes lost total Rs 212 crores per year (roughly US $53 million). Since 60% of SEZsare for the IT sector, it is unlikely that any of these new jobs will be filled by displaced agriculturallaborers. The losses in public revenues may be even more devastating due to tax exemptions.More difficult to calculate is the public and social cost to dispossessed farming communities —underemployed, distressed and ending up in the city’s informal housing settlements.

38 ‘Bangalore office rentals may fall as IT firms eye SEZs’ (SiliconIndia.com, 2008).39 ‘It’s raining Singapore on Bangalore land’ (The Bangalore Blog, 2005), ‘US private equity goes

town-building in India’ (Forbes, 2007a) and ‘DLF (Delhi) surges on township deal with Dubai’ (Forbes,2007b). Dubai-based Limitless was confident about the long-term prospects of India’s real estatesector and showcased 11 projects including Bidadi, a 9,000-hectare development near Bangalorewhich would have housed around 750,000 people. ‘India is currently facing a shortage of some 21million homes, and more than 300 million people are expected to migrate to urban areas over thenext 20 years’ said Saeed Ahmed Saeed, CEO of Limitless, in the article ‘UAE real estate firms eyeIndian opportunities’ (Arabianbusiness.com, 2008).

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This worlding of Indian cities has triggered shifts in new technologies of governmentthat affect urban and rural people who have ‘given it all up’ in the name of world-citymaking. The emphasis here is on what Ananya Roy (2009a) calls a new mode of spatialproduction, one which transcends the problematic informal/formal dyad: so much ofwhat happens on the ground in Bangalore today is over the question of land, fueled byformal (yet opaque parastatal) state bodies working informally to change land tenure.There is sufficient uncertainty built into these endeavors that the city and its peripheryis engulfed by a collective social angst over whether or not one’s domicile will be takenover to build the new Metro, widen a road, construct a housing complex or a specialexport zone. This social anxiety in turn generates large flows of cash as a normal practiceto reduce the chances of personal and community bankruptcy, i.e. everyone must paywhat s/he can in order to influence the outcome, even though outcomes are alreadyover-determined by class, caste and gender inequities when it comes to who will getdisplaced and whose land can be avoided by world-city project planning (Kamath et al.,2008). In Bangalore, rising urban anxiety is not about traffic, congestion, pollution, filthor too few good pubs; the most palpable urban anxiety is focused on official land-theftand the speculative nature of routine decision-making in a rising world city. Even ashighly lauded middle-class civic associations hold regular public meetings calling fortransparency, participation, accountability and more, drawing up annual ‘report cards’ onthe performance of each government agency, marching in line with the global mandatefor audit culture as politics, the omnipresent practices of world-city making — land theftand the legitimating governance structure being built up around it — are treated asanomalies or part of the age-old problem of corruption (Strathern 2000; Ghosh, 2006a;2006b) and yet they have become as common as the Nike ‘swoosh’ logo or ‘India Rising’billboards.

Conclusion: the art of speculative governmentThese highly inequitable spatially diffused dynamics are not well explained by newurban theories focusing on the recent shifts experienced in Western cities, moving froman earlier Keynesian managerial stance to denationalized (Sassen, 2006), revanchist(Smith, 1996), neoliberal roll-back/roll-out (Peck and Tickell, 2002) or entrepreneurial(Harvey, 2005) models. World-city projects not only represent large-scale place-alteringcapital infusions (i.e. billions of dollars from Dubai, Singapore and the IFIs), they domore than merely facilitate the restructuring of governance institutions for improvedaccess to public goods and services for international capital (i.e. privatization oftownship governance, special citizenship rights and privileged rules for SEZs). They alsotrigger new political rationalities of government and technologies of rule that emerge insitu as bureaucrats and political officials, brokering jackpot deals for external clients,generate their own rent-seeking mechanisms of world-city wealth redistribution. Thesepoliticians also have to manage the desires of the IFIs that are, paradoxically, pushingfor national legislation to repeal the archaic land-acquisition laws which allow for thiseminent domain strategy, and for government agencies to possibly produce massive ‘landbanks’ for these world-city projects.40

Of course, this is not the first time local state actors have demanded a piece of thesurplus pie, but the magnitude, speed, and the overarching aura of legitimacy of thesenew governance endeavors locally and worldwide are important to note. ‘Accumulationby (mass) dispossession’ has become one mandate, as Harvey (2003) observes, comingfrom global finance capital, supported by the IFIs, and a gritty reality (and realty)emanating from the prevalent global discourses of world-city making, Flat Worldismand ‘India Rising’. Through the everyday practices of world-city making, government

40 Thanks to a perceptive IJURR referee for reminding me of this tension.



actors — deeply entangled with real estate brokers/dealers and political party leaders —are actively auctioning public lands and goods, as well as using the muscle of ‘the goodof the nation’-style development to push small land-users aside in the rush to capitalizeon global forms of land speculation.

Bangalore is not only becoming less dependent on local denizens, it is also becomingdetached from Delhi (seat of India’s central government) and the needs of the ruralperiphery. Instead, perhaps more than any time in recent history, what happens inShanghai, Singapore and Dubai matters to small producers and workers in Karnataka.Up until late 2008, condominiums in Dubai sold for a few million dollars, and ones inBangalore for one million; by comparison, land in the rural periphery of Bangaloreappeared ‘globally competitive’, i.e. dirt cheap. Whether or not EAD builds its Airbusfactory, Walmart its string of warehouses, Taj its seven-star hotel, or Dubai’s Limitless itsprivate township, millions of land users will be displaced and the land will be churnedmany times over in the process of speculation. Even the middle-class city-core residentsfeel heightened anxiety about whether they can keep their family home: for every newroad or Metro transport project there comes a design for a world-class mall or flyoveror business park — all requiring land far beyond the ‘public use’ of the project, alwaysjustified as necessary for ‘cost recovery’ and global competiveness, as the IFIs havepushed doggedly for over the past two decades. It is uncertain how many of these projectswill be built, and few even among the city leaders have a full picture of which ones areactually being built. Yet it is this state of uncertainty and anxiety that generates increasedcash flows, increased risk-taking in urban planning and development, speculativegovernment and the suspension of justice for the dispossessed in the name of world-citymaking.

By December 2008, much of the miraculous side of Asian city real estate value hadbegun to vanish. As one German realtor in Dubai explained on German TV in February2009: ‘What real estate market? There isn’t a market at all. Value has dropped by 75%and nothing is moving’.41 In fact, she only captured half the ‘moving’ story in Dubai:in March 2009, 30,000 seats were booked by the UAE government on India-boundjumbo jets to fly home the low-paid Indian building construction workers, their passportsreturned to them at the gate. As the leaking real estate bubble in Dubai requires largebailouts from Abu Dhabi, disappearing dollar remittances from construction workersin the Gulf States to local Indian economies severely undercut the Indian government’sability to support its urbanization loans (Human Rights Watch, 2006). At election time inApril 2009, senior politicians in Bangalore were asking publicly if the internationalairport development plan might be scaled back to allow for some dispossessed farmersto regain their land. (It is both a typical campaign strategy and an acknowledgement thatcash flows into world-city projects have reversed.)

Even before this crisis, ‘reverse flows’ of urbanism, or what Solomon Benjamin calls‘occupancy urbanism’, have been long occurring (Benjamin, 2008) — i.e. unoccupiedland under speculation is often re-occupied by small agricultural producers andmerchants who are allowed to resume what they had previously been doing, namelyfarming or trading under highly insecure tenure rights.42 Although not unique, this is oneof many coping mechanisms for marginal producers working within the parameters ofspeculative urbanism. Globally oriented IT firms, however, are the main drivers of this artof speculative urbanism, as many of them also practice an occupancy game: perched onshort-term leases in their government-subsidized world-class campuses, and willing tobe showered with public subsidies and tax holidays by both their present ‘homes’ as well

41 ‘Even illustrious Dubai is suffering a devastating real estate crash’ (Deutsche Welle TV, 17 February2009). To take just one example in Dubai, 200 luxury residential skyscrapers built on the mainharbor from 2004 to 2008 remained empty in 2010.

42 Benjamin is working in many central and peripheral areas of Bangalore; colleagues and I arestudying this dispossession process in the airport development area, and following one group totheir new homes.

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as their future ones (firm-friendly Hyderabad, Pune, Manila or Shenzhen). Speculativeurbanism may be a useful way of describing firms’ status, as well as that of the state, withwhich firms are in constant negotiation and leveraging. How can city dwellers imagine,and undertake, long-term place-based urban planning when the major financial actorshave on their side of the bargaining table the ability to be permanently transient?

The 2008–09 global financial meltdown revealed its world-city manifestations:new parastatal governmental agencies have been created on the basis of internationalborrowing and municipal bond marketing; they are fueled by speculative internationalprojects and financed by other world-city real estate ventures. Since the ability ofgovernment to provide services and goods is based on rents from these promised externalcapital flows, when these flows run dry, so do the essential services. (Even as the biggestaccomplishment in water delivery service in Bangalore has been a water pipeline to theunder-utilized new airport, most new residences depend on private sources of water,including tapping the much diminished public aquifers.) As AbdouMaliq Simone(2004b) notes, when the state is absent, perhaps drawn toward a capital-flush projectat one end of town and away from the areas where most people live and work,the vulnerable majority, out of necessity, become the ‘infrastructure’ necessary toprovide ‘public’ resources and support. Simone reminds us that most urbanites sustainthemselves in spite of the state and without much access to governance structures. Yetin Bangalore, one also finds an art of government that focuses on catching up with thespeculative world of real estate by generating new forms of governance informally onthe spot, refracting the brightest sparks from the volatile speculative economy, andintervening in people’s livelihood practices in ways that increase their vulnerabilities andrisks. Somewhere in the crossfire of ‘occupancy urbanism’ and ‘people as infrastructure’,one finds a political rationality of speculative government chasing and participating inworld-city making. In this case, real estate becomes the real state and vice versa.

During these tumultuous times, the state’s suspension of basic human and civil rightsseems to be permanent (Agamben, 2005). In its determination to catch up with Shanghaiand cash in on its own world city, the Indian state aggressively uses the rules of eminentdomain to acquire land from the few who own land and the many who thrive off the land,and place them on the new multi-lane highway to elsewhere. Many have been reducedto ‘bare life’, no longer covered by legal or civil rights that once guaranteed them someaccess to the city and its resources, and yet are drowning under new legal reforms and themobilization of old colonial land laws; these state acts have effectively stripped themajority of their rights to the public sphere, the countryside and the city. Indeed, manyBangaloreans are being actively dispossessed as part of the effort to build up a world citybased on a speculative imaginary for world-city investors who may just stay away, andfor world-city professionals who have yet to come.

Michael Goldman ([email protected]), Department of Sociology and the Institute forGlobal Studies, University of Minnesota, 909 Social Sciences Bldg, 267 19th AvenueSouth, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.

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RésuméEn Inde, Bangalore passe par un processus de fabrication de ‘ville mondiale’. Pourl’étudier, cet article examine les projets spécifiques à cette dimension urbaine, lesorganes para-étatiques qui les gèrent, le secteur des technologies informatiques en pleinessor qui est censé être le moteur du processus, ainsi que les dynamiques interurbainesqui relient les villes mondiales comme Dubaï et Singapour. Ces activités sont associéesen grande partie à l’entreprise, particulièrement rémunératrice, de transformation deséconomies rurales en secteur immobilier urbain. Le gouvernement actuel de Bangalores’emploie principalement à des opérations de spéculation foncière et de dépossessionénergique à l’encontre des populations qui travaillent et vivent dans la zonepériphérique rurale, sur les terrains où se bâtissent les projets de la ‘ville mondiale’. Cet‘état d’exception’ temporaire, avec la suspension afférente de droits civiques et humains,parallèlement à son institutionnalisation dans certaines pratiques du gouvernement,reflète le passage vers de nouvelles formes de citoyenneté, d’urbanisme, d’économie etde gouvernement ‘spéculateur’.



speculative urbanism and the making of the next world city

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