Ban Galore

Volume 35.
3 May 2011 55581
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.01001.x
Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City

MICHAEL GOLDMAN
Abstract
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This article explores the process of making Bangalore, India into a world city by focusing on specic world-city projects, the parastatal government agencies managing them, 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 of these activities are linked to the highly remunerative challenge of transforming rural economies into urban real estate. Land speculation and active dispossession of those working and living in the rural periphery, on land upon which the new world-city projects are being built, is the main business of government today in Bangalore. This article suggests that this temporary state of exception, with both its attendant suspensions of civil and human rights as well as their institutionalization into government practices, reects a shift into new forms of speculative government, economy, urbanism and citizenship.
Introduction: India Rising1

India Grapples with How to Convert its Farmland into Factories, declares a headline to a US newspaper article (The New York Times, 17 September 2008), deftly summarizing the principal tension running through the urban periphery of much of Asia today, with the subheading suggesting that the peasants have become the nal obstacle preventing India from attaining globally integrated economic prosperity. As 70% of Indias population thrives on rural economic relations, this roadblock to the globalization dream seems fairly substantial. In this article, I propose a different framing of urbanrural tensions as they are up within the context of world-city making.
I would like to thank Wesley Longhofer, Vinay Baindur and P. Rajan for their excellent intellectual and research support; Professors Gopal Karanth and Supriya RoyChowdhury of the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), and Professors Carol Upadhya, Narendar Pani and A.R. Vasavi of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in the Indian Institute for Science Bangalore (IISc), and the rest of the NIAS professors, graduate students, staff and its director, for the creative and supportive environment in the center of town; and the exceptional and generous scholar Professor Solomon Benjamin, as well as scholars R. Bhuvaneswari, Lalitha Kamath and others who have helped me enormously. Thanks also to Sinan Erensu, Guillaume Boccara, Heather OLeary, my colleagues at the University of Minnesota, particularly in our inspiring Global Cities collaborative, as well as audiences and commentators at UC Berkeley, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Michigan, Dickinson College, South Asia Conference at University of WisconsinMadison, Hamline University, St. Olaf College, Duke University, Newcastle and Northumbria universities (UK), Madras Institute for Development Studies (Chennai), Tata Institute for Social Studies in Mumbai, and the Centre for Internet and 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.
2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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From my ongoing research on Bangalore Asias self-proclaimed Silicon Valleyand a model for world-city making I focus here on how rural communities have been thrown into the center of world-city making and how the process of dispossession reshapes the state. Is this merely a transitional, speculative, exceptional moment, or is the state initiating a set of dynamics that puts the majority under a type of rule of law that can be called (to borrow from Giorgio Agamben, 2005) a lasting state of exception? Since most world-city projects require land from the citys rural periphery, how is this practice of conversion of the rural into the urban affecting class and community social and economic relations, and new subject conditions? If, as the ofcial argument2 goes, Indias integration into the global economy depends upon new forms of industrialization (in and through the information technology revolution) and urbanization (by creating world cities as 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 changes reect a new mode of spatial and social production in cities? Are the imperatives in becoming a world city motivated by logics and desires coming from specic sectors of industry or nance capital (cf. David Harvey), from distinctive forces of urbanization (cf. Henri Lefebvre) or some other dynamics? This article argues that the exceptional rules of 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 redening state relations, urban citizenship, rights and rules 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 congurations generating socio-spatial dynamics geared toward extending and reproducing the power and 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 these theoretical arguments bear out in the case of what they call second- or third-tier global (or world) cities, one nds that this impulse to t cities into a multi-tiered hierarchy glosses over signicant social dynamics occurring within and among lower-tiered other cities (Simone, 2001; 2004a; 2004b; Robinson, 2002; 2006; Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari, 2006; Benjamin, 2008; Roy, 2009a; 2009b). In Bangalore, one nds a number of phenomena working below the radar of the global-cities analytics, some of which are worthy of consideration. First, alongside the much-acknowledged international nance institutions (or IFIs, such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank) facilitating urban transformation are the much less scrutinized transnational policy networks inuencing and implementing new urban projects, bringing together local administrators with European GIS (Geographic Information Systems) consultants, Southeast Asian builders and good governance NGOs (Goldman, 2005). Second, in conjunction with the shrinking role of certain old bureaucratic actors are a new eet of powerful parastatal agencies carving out new terrains and conguring technologies of power through legislative ats under the rubric of eminent domain for the public good, as well as through informal everyday practices of land encroachment, lower-class peoples dispossession, and
2 The ofcial argument reects the dominant liberalization through urbanization agenda of the Indian government which, as this article shows, is cultivated, sponsored and legitimated by transnational policy networks comprising ofcials/consultants from the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers, chambers of commerce, and elite international urban planning programs and fora. 3 In popular discourse, the highest echelon of world cities are often called global cities; amongst scholars, there are more specic distinctions. Global is often a signal of a high density of globally relevant activities by international forms of capital, whereas world has an older usage and often connotes a worldly cultural distinctiveness (e.g. Athens, Cairo).
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.3 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Bangalore International Airport (est. 28 sq. kms.)
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BANGALORE (696 sq. kms.)
IT Corridor (113 sq. kms.) Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (117 sq. kms. )
Pre-2007 city boundaries 226 sq. kms.
Figure 1 Bangalores growing world-city projects (source: graphic adapted by Wesley Longhofer using information from Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari, University of Minnesota presentation, May 2008)
cross-class and community power-brokering. And third, a new architecture of capital relations has emerged in Bangalore that is not only similar to transformations occurring in other cities across Asia with world-city ambitions, but is also linked through interurban relations across these cities. The Singapore model of governance, the Shanghai model of infrastructure development and the Bangalore model of IT growth ow across major Asian cities as swiftly as do large amounts of nance capital and pools of ill-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, no longer the glacially slow-moving bureaucracy of jokes and lament. As the city plans its 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 worlds largest megalopolises see Figure 1), the newly empowered and internationally debt-nanced parastatals oversee the rapid expansion of the city boundaries, the congealing of rural governments into a world-city one, and projects of land acquisition, airport and highway construction, housing townships, and new water and sanitation infrastructure. Most of these activities are linked to the tangible and highly remunerative challenge of transforming rural economies into urban real estate. How can we understand this recent state obsession in India with real estate speculation? How can we explain the political rationality of active dispossession in the name of world-city accumulation, and the political formations that emerge from persistent interactions between vulnerable citizens and emboldened government actors focused primarily on land acquisition? Land speculation and active dispossession inside and surrounding the city of Bangalore is the main business of its government today. The anxieties of high-rolling speculation not only affect peoples ability to hold onto their living spaces, but also their jobs, identities and communities. Living in a world city like Bangalore today becomes a highly speculative, and dangerous, proposition.
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A natural trajectory?
In rethinking Bangalores transformation, it is useful to start by asking from where this specic impetus of contemporary world-city making came: how did certain discursive strategies emerge to assume dominance, while many other alternative planning narratives became provincialized? What are the formative connections within India, across other world cities, and between Bangalore rural and Bangalore urban; how might these social relations eclipse previous development mandates and, more importantly, livelihoods and social relations thriving in spite of development mandates? Initially, Bangalore did not shift into world-city mode as part of a larger moral panic to refashion the Third World mega-city teeming with uncontrollable violence, wrenching poverty and fetid living (Srinivas, 2001; Hansen, 2005).4 Until the IT explosion of the 1990s, Bangalore was a comfortable middle-class town with secure union jobs in large public-sector research and manufacturing rms that fed into the high-end functions of the Indian state and economy (e.g. radar and satellite systems, telecommunications and space research, manufacturing equipment). A few years into the IT boom, Bangalore was not burning or a planet of slums. Instead, rms such as Texas Instruments asked for substantial upgrading of Bangalores pleasant but smalltown public facilities in order to survive in the ercely competitive global IT sector (Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005; interviews with author, 200608).5 Bangalores largest employers, many of which started in the early 1900s, were BEL (Bharat Electronics Ltd), HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd), ITI (Indian Telephone Industries), HMT (Hindustan Machine Tools), BHEL (Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd), Mysore Industrial and Testing Laboratory and Mysore Lamps Works, which alongside the nations top science institutes, such as the Indian Institute of Science (previously the Tata Institute), produced the rst wave of Indias IT revolution in the 1950s, in aeronautics, space research, radar and remote sensing, military equipment and factory toolmaking (Vyasulu and Ready, 1984; Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005; Upadhya and Vasavi, 2008; interviews with author 200608). Bangalores urban landscape had been shaped by the housing and industrial colonies for these plants and their workers and managers, with English-speaking schools, housing colonies, health clinics, shopping areas, bus lines, parks and community centers where local organizations meet. As Bangalore-based economist Narendar Pani (2009: 117) writes: These townships [since incorporated into Bangalore city] covered hundreds of acres of land each, and in the case of the Aircraft Township of Hindustan Aeronautics, 2,847 acres (Nair, 2005: 89). These units attracted workers of varying skill levels from technologists to unskilled labour. A strongly unionized labour force meant that the lowest paid public sector employees tted
4 There are many versions and discursive genealogies of this moral panic scenario, in which the dire conditions of the Third World megacity must be addressed, or else: most recently from the sympathetic Left, such as Mike Davis (2006) and Robert Neuwirth (2004) and a more comprehensive 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 the World Banks (2008) World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography. 5 This phenomenal high-growth IT sector emerged from Bangalore, Indias longstanding science city, due to a signicant historical conjuncture: Indias 1991 economic crash (as remittances and oil stopped owing from the Gulf as a result of the rst Iraq war, requiring that India ship its gold reserves to Londons banks to back its huge foreign debt) empowered a small cadre of former high-level IFI ofcials led by the current PM Manmohan Singh to create Indias economic liberalization policy. Barriers for capital and commodity ows across Indias borders fell, which coincided with Western rms concerns about the potential crash of its computers, seeking Indian engineers to solve its enormous, but tedious, Y2K problem. Once inside Western rms, Indian engineers realized the simplicity of the routine data-management work that curried good salaries for Americans and Europeans, and suggested that by employing Indians, rms could cut costs by three-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 public sector workers then had access to Bangalores English based technical education.6 The phenomenal growth of Indias recent IT revolution led to the arrival of the worlds most protable and innovative IT rms, plopping themselves down in cow pastures, spinach elds and drained irrigation tanks (small lakes) on the southern and eastern outskirts of the city. Since most of what the IT sector produces is software coding and data management, all of which can be transported globally via satellite and ber-optic cables, rms 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 making Bangalore into a world city, that Bangalore developed mega-city problems rife with rapidly escalating social inequality, mass displacement and dispossession, proliferation of slum settlements, increased caste- and religious group-based violence and tensions, and epidemic public health crises due to severe water supply and sewage problems (in working-class neighborhoods). Roads are extremely congested and vehicles generate such high levels of pollution that many motorcyclists travel around with bloodshot eyes and respiratory problems. How did Indias garden city and pensioners paradise become such a world-city nightmare?
The making of a world-city discourse

The key movers and shakers for urban transformation in Indias largest cities include coalitions of local business elites (such as the Confederation of Indian Industry and NASSCOM, the software industrys chamber of commerce), professionals from the IFIs and bilateral aid agencies, non-resident Indians living abroad (NRIs), internationally connected NGOs, along with Indias elite urban bureaucrats and ofcials. Their approach overlaps with other globally circulating efforts promoting a master plan agenda, often promoting a single sector of the economy as an engine of rapid accumulation through large infusions of external loans and investments for 24/7 world-class urban infrastructure (see PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2005; 2007). Their discursive convergence is expressed in a number of networking and deal-making events, such as one I attended at the Taj Exotica Hotel in the beach resort of Goa in February 2007. Capturing the confessional sentiment of a newly transnational-oriented bureaucratic elite during the rst international conference on Indian cities sponsored by the EuroIndia Forum, a soft-spoken city commissioner from the city of Jaipur in northwest India took the podium and gave a short speech which I paraphrase here.8
Thanks to these types of meetings and experiences and conversations, I have begun to see my home city differently. When I look out from Jaipurs main railway station, I can see makeshift huts with women cleaning dishes and children playing and grazing their animals, the dhobis washing 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 couldnt 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 industrial colonies but not to the neighborhoods that built up around them, which reected the class- and community-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 out of India, demanded that Indian IT rms show their goods being exported, and in the rst few years had to also put their work on CDs so that the agents could get their fair cut and be sure that the whole protable sector was not some hoax. 8 A chamber of commerce-type organization designed for Western Europes and Indias big-city mayors and rms promoting their consulting, real estate, tourism and high-end service sectors (http://www.the-euroindia-centre.org/Content/Default.aspx).
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shopping malls? Now I can imagine that Jaipur too can become a world city that can generate jobs 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 exciting place to be.
These comments reect more than one individuals cultural epiphany, as one nds such confessions, revelations and logics in presentations from PricewaterhouseCoopers staff, in bureaucrat training courses, urban planning exercises, international fora on urban futures and in Asian Development Bank loan portfolios. Together, they reect a sequence of events unfolding over recent years in India (and further back), which can be summarized in the following way. First, the career trajectory of an ambitious administrative civil servant has changed, such that it is now imperative that ones track-record should include training programs on making cities globally competitive, run by international agencies (at the World Bank for the better socially networked, or those at the Hyderabad-based Administrative Staff College of Indias Urban Management program, originally designed by the World Bank Institute).9 Second, local government agencies now bid for international nance loans and grants, always accompanied by consultancies from transnational policy networks (e.g. PricewaterhouseCoopers), hired to design and manage these large dollar loans (and debts). Third, the central government of India has initiated its own world-city investment strategy, J. Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission or JNNURM, channeling more than US $11 billion to cities that bid for a slice of this money (over 7 years starting from 200506), with conditions attached that encourage corporate partnerships between foreign service providers and public goods managers in state agencies, borrowing capital from international markets and nancing debt through municipal bonds, and other steps that convert these small bureaucracies into competitive and responsibilized agents (Rose, 1999) of new urban nancial and governance norms. Converting what Hernando De Soto (2000) called zero-value dead capital into high-value liquid capital, city ofcials have embarked upon a new way of managing the public: worlding through speculation and liquidation. This adjusted aperture allows observers to participate in the business of imagining the transformation of old city markets into central business districts, clusters of small shops and street-vending locales into downtown shopping malls, and irrigation tanks and village elds into glass and steel corporate campuses of the business worlds new Googles (Shrivastava, 2008). There is much to be gained and much that will change in this process of envisioning change, even if much of these plans are never realized. The World Bank/De Soto approach attributes economic stagnation to the failure of the command-and-control state to nurture freedom of investment and the entrepreneurial spirit amongst the whole population, right down to the ready-to-be-unleashed poor.10 This urban modernization approach argues that rural peasants need not continue to play the static role of urban salesmen, pushing old handcarts selling pitiful bundles of vegetables and herbs; peddlers, vendors, beggars and slumdogs also desire an opportunity to leverage their participation in city life and capitalize on the transformations of city economic life. The poor should expect more from their cities, and these globally integrating projects are precisely the vehicle to meet such expectations. Following from this global-city logic, rural communities can be more than mere suppliers of (cheap) city food products, but also landlords and providers of higher-end services to world-class IT engineers, which is what many of these world-city projects on the outskirts of Bangalore promise.
9 A 2009 workshop on strengthening urban management, co-sponsored by the Administrative Staff College and World Bank Institute, featured modules such as Creating Creditworthy Cities and Urban Systems, Good Urban Governance and Decentralisation and Change Management. 10 See the World Banks (2008) World Development Report: Reshaping Economic Geography, and the Banks urban strategy website: http://www.wburbanstrategy.org/urbanstrategy/; see also Ananya Roys (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 of privatization bravado.11 Mega-cities approached public health and capital-scarcity problems by raising foreign capital through international auctioning, turning aged and under-nanced infrastructure into something that could provide world-class 24/7 European-style service. In the process, local government bodies would be radically reshaped. Across the urban global South, the size of this public-to-private shift in the 1990s has been world-altering: to just take the example of water privatization, only a handful of city dwellers in 1990 purchased their daily water from European rms; yet by 2000, more than 450 million urban customers had been created and analysts have predicted 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 from European rms would follow.) For a brief moment in those heady days for Vivendi, Bechtel, Enron and other rapidly consolidating and expanding high-end global service rms, Casablanca (Morocco) was the experimental site for the new world city: with World Bank funding and conditionalities, Northern rms hoped to bundle the needs of a middle-class household into one-stop service cable TV and internet, telephone, water, garbage, electricity and sewage all delivered by one rm to middle-class Southern homes in world-class European style.13 On the heels of this urban services revolution, the next stage of IFI-fueled privatization evolved into world-city making, based on the following logic: why not transform the whole service-provisioning system, more than just the water down the pipe or the electricity across the urban grid, but the whole system of urban infrastructure and its management, including all the open and untapped land in between and below this under-utilized urban infrastructure? Acres of under-utilized or dilapidated public infrastructure reected thrice-ignored capital reserves: dead infrastructural capital sitting on dead land capital overseen by dead managerial capital. The idea brought a renewed vigor to city ofcialdom, as if city leaders had discovered oil reserves under crowded open-air markets, debt-burdened farming villages and their own ofce desks.14
Speculative governance
One key condition (and opportunity) levied by the IFIs and endorsed by Indias central government was the mandate to reform public agencies into single window one-stop shopping 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 and auctioned public goods and infrastructure, from Ugandan railways to Honduras garbage-collection services. Although that site is no more, it still has a number of active sites and loans where privatization of public sectors is encouraged. 12 See reports by PSIRU, such as Water Multinationals in Retreat 2003, Aquafed 2006 and Public Solutions 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 being auctioned to France to serve the local elite and by 2004, remarkably, most of the metropolitan water deals around the world were scrapped due to widespread social protest, which in some Latin American countries (such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay) turned rapidly into progressive political change (PSIRU, 2006; Goldman, 2007). 14 Besides the motivation to cultivate a synergy with these high-end service rms, the World Bank has its own reasons to support this shift to world-city building. A consequence of the anti-privatization response to its policies has been a widespread disinvestment from the World Bank by national ruling bodies, such that by the mid-2000s, the Bank and IMF were losing their client base across Latin America and what the Bank calls its middle-income countries of Asia. However, it found a source of new clients through its direct lending to weak urban local bodies, ill-equipped to take on international 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 nancing.
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projects, ostensibly blending efciency with good governance, ditching the slowchurning and much-maligned Indian state bureaucracy (Fuller and Benei, 2000; Harriss et al., 2004; De, 2006; Harriss, 2006; Shaw, 2007; Baindur and Kamath, 2009). Both contributing to, and undermining, a national turn in Indian government in the mid-1990s towards decentralization and democratization (the passing of the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution in 1993 to decentralize power from state-level authorities to rural panchayats and urban municipal authorities), many of Bangalores key government agencies are newly empowered parastatals, accountable only to Karnatakas chief minister and the international lending agencies that nance them.15 The sole elected urban local body (ULB) for Bangalore, Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (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 expand the citys limits to include seven surrounding towns and 103 villages, thereby tripling it in size, the corporators have been suspended since September 2006.16 As the only democratically elected body in Bangalore, their responsibilities have always been quite limited, responding to complaints from citizens about storm drains, solid waste management, roads, schools, stray dogs and health services. By contrast, the most powerful city agencies are those shaped and nanced by IFIs: the Bangalore Development Agency (BDA) overseeing the Comprehensive Development Plan; Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation (KUIDFC) set up by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB) to oversee their funds; and Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board (KIADB) which negotiates land acquisitions for mega-city schemes. The world-city project-based parastatals include Bangalore International Airport Area Planning Authority (BIAAPA) and BangaloreMysore Infrastructural Corridor Area Planning Authority (BMICAPA). Parastatals are unique in that they depend largely upon external and project nancing, and have little or no local oversight, being directly accountable only to the lenders and to the Karnataka chief minister, a party-elected ofcial (Chamaraj, 2009). Hence, decentralization and local empowerment have not led to democratization; on the contrary, attempts to bring democracy to the town or city have been undermined, whereas the internationalized development technologies of voluntarism and civil-society participation have temporarily triumphed (Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari, 2001; Nair, 2005; Ghosh, 2005; 2006a; 2006b), as we will see below. Three signicant institutional shifts have occurred in the governance arena: rst, as Baindur and Kamath have astutely noted through their research, most of the key World Bank and Asian Development Bank recommended policy reforms on urban governance have been subsequently instituted as requirements for access to their loans, as well as to those offered by the central governments main lender to cities, the J. Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission or JNNURM (Baindur and Kamath, 2009: 28). Starting in 2001, IFI recommendations have included the repeal of the Urban Land Ceiling Regulation Act, phased reduction of stamp duties, phase out of rent control laws and indexing rents of municipal properties to market rents, unbundling of municipal services to create user charge revenue streams for each public service, rapid increases in tariffs for water and utilities, and the introduction of double entry accrual accounting. All have been incorporated into JNNURM guidelines for urban local bodies, and have shaped the creation and work of new urban parastatal agencies. These reforms are separating historically weak government agencies overseeing very small maintenance budgets from newly autonomous agencies; the latter have become swollen with large budgets and yet
15 These parastatal agencies reect a broader trend of building what PricewaterhouseCoopers (2005) consultants call democratic capital, or establishing various publicprivate partnerships in an effort to 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 pressure occurred 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 dened by high risk multi-million dollar international loans and large-scale obligations of debt nance. Second, expert commissions and task forces have since 1999 played a critical role, as an institutional apparatus that could meet demands that the present system of elected corporators [or city councilors] does not adequately fulll, and to help citizens make informed and effective decisions that truly represent citizens priorities, a direct call to take ownership and get to participate in governance (Nair, 2005: 15). That apparatus was the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), a 15-member nominated body of elite representatives from the IT and biotech industries (such as Infosys CEO Nanden Nilekani) and the business community (such as Naresh Malhotra of KPMGBangalore), plus NGO leaders (such as Ramesh Ramanathan, a former Citibank trader from New York who started Janaagraha, and Samuel Paul, a former World Bank ofcial from Washington, DC and director of Public Affairs Centre, both of whom have played a lead role as citizen-participation/government watchdogs in town). Before its closure in the mid-2000s, the BATF ofce and many of its initiatives were funded by Nilekanis private foundation, Adhaar Trust, which also offered seed grants for entrepreneurial projects that would help BATFs main initiatives: Swachha Bangalore, or Clean Bangalore, and Swayam Ghoshane, or Self-Promotion (Heitzman, 2004: 103; Ghosh 2005).17 BATF hoped to be the citizen-based vehicle for depoliticized, audit-based, anti-red tape urban initiatives. It wanted a no-nonsense approach to urban development, based on the Singapore model of cleanliness and efciency. Its biggest success was its construction of well-adorned bus stops and clean public toilets in select sites. But their attempts to institutionalize the task force approach to governance met with resistance from citizen-group protestors as well as civil service suspicions. Whereas BATF was started by the newly elected Congress Partys chief minister S.M. Krishna, who unabashedly wanted to turn Bangalore into Singapore, BATFs successor, ABIDe Bengaluru, was started by BJP Partys chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa, once he was elected in 2008, with its members from the BJP Party, senior government and industry ofcials, along with Ramesh Ramanathan from Janaagraha again.18 One of their agship projects might be a 60 km monorail system (Times News Network, 2009). Although specic 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 trend of placing elite corporate and citizen leaders in positions of power to circumvent existing forms of government decision-making seems to have stuck in Bangalore, much as it has in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi (Chamaraj, 2009). Third, citizen action groups such as Janaagraha and Public Affairs Centre (PAC), led by ex-IFI and Wall Street professionals, have been working under the premise that only when citizens participate by shaking things up, looking under the rug and taking the lead in moving projects forward will Bangalore become a world city (see PAC and Janaagraha websites http://www.pacindia.org/ and http://janaagraha.org/). Social audits are a key technology for forcing government agencies to become more transparent and responsive. Samuel Pauls PAC created the citizens report card opinion surveys asking consumers to rate their public utilities and service-delivering agencies. PAC publicizes the results, engages in dialogue with the respective agencies and mobilizes
17 BATF focused assiduously on what scholars researching different Indian cities call middle-class urban 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 smells of 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 acronym that expresses professional-class frustration with the way the urban majority does not follow the rules and aesthetics of cosmopolitan world cities such as Singapore, and comfortably slides into the cultural expectations of Hindutva urban culture (i.e. the Hindu nationalist claim on the proper way of being a Hindu). In other words, moralistic class, caste and religious-group tropes have saturated the rhetoric of elite voluntarist civic campaigns.
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middle-class professionals to push for better services. PAC has run high-prole public fora for English-speaking professional-class audiences, and worked closely with parastatals and the IFIs to ensure that its citizen constituents are heard in world-city project proposals. Attracted to this form of citizen activism, the World Bank and Asian Development Bank have since hired Paul and PAC to consult on their behalf in worldcity initiatives across Asia and Africa. Indias central government has hired Ramanathan and Janaagraha to promote citizen participation across India.19 By 2008, BATF had vanished and been replaced by BJP-led ABIDe, Ramanathan and most of Janaagraha had shifted to Delhi to undertake citizens participation work for JNNURMs 64-city lending program, and Paul and PAC had reduced their Bangalore work while becoming more involved in World Bank consulting abroad. How are these rapid turnovers in government and governance affecting the running of Bangalore? Do we see a deepening of democracy through IFI-nanced highly efcient parastatals, eminent-citizen task forces, citizen NGOs demanding accountability and participation? Well, the mandate to expand and extend Bangalore outwards has inuenced the decentralization/democratization process in one very concrete way. In one village absorbed by the expanding IT corridor on the eastern side of the city, its panchayat leader once represented 300 households as a representative elected by his farming neighbors; his ofce has been replaced by a city corporator, a well-connected politician-cum-real estate broker who now represents more than 30,000 people, which is the typical ratio for newly aligned city wards. Now that his vegetable-growing community has been consumed by IT corporate enclaves, this political position has gained considerable value in the new marketplace of world-city politics. Whereas farmers in the villages and trade unionists in the working-class urban neighborhoods dominated these localized elected positions less than a decade ago, today these seats are worth tens of millions of rupees to the highest bidder as the political hierarchy and real estate industry melds together (perhaps temporarily). At the same time, parastatal agencies set up to oversee world-city projects have usurped the small-time service-maintenance government agencies. Elite task forces have 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 schemes have always come to Indias prized cities (the Commonwealth Games in Delhi for example), and Bangalore historically (with its many high-prole science/technology projects) has been no exception. For the rst time, however, these world-city projects are redening the art of government, with statecitizen relations becoming shaped by the culture of neoliberal speculation. The next section highlights the emergent geometry of power of mega-world-city projects and its institutional effects on the art of government.
Reterritorializing through world-city projects

This section briey traces three urban mega-schemes currently being executed: the BangaloreMysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) (see Figure 2), the IT corridor, and the Bangalore International airport and its surrounding development area (BIAL), to highlight prevailing worlding practices (John, 2005). The international airport, which opened in May 2008, was built and is being run by a consortium led by the Unique Zurich Airport rm and Siemens, receiving highly subsidized land from the government 35 kms north of the city, extensive enough to build 2.5 Heathrow (London) airports. The IT corridor on the citys eastern periphery is yet to be fully built, on land not yet fully
19 Pauls Report Card technology has been replicated for many Bank loan recipients, including the Philippines and Gambia (see World Bank webpage http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/ TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/.html).
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Figure 2 Proposed BMIC highway and its Special Economic Zones and private townships (source: graphic adapted by Wesley Longhofer using information from the NICE, Ltd website)
acquired; planned to be 1.5 times the size of Paris, it will be subsidized by the government with the help of a Singapore-based rm. Although intended to have its own local government, it would tap into Greater Bangalores renanced power and water grids. The IT corridor and airport will be connected by a world-class monorail built to transport IT professionals back and forth between airport and work, ying above the trafc jams and nuisance of the city below. Throughout the expanding metropolitan area, the international nance institutions are lending for major water and sanitation improvements, road upgrades and expansions, and the professionalization of the government sector with new laws, regulatory bodies, staff training and e-government systems. (One such project is the bhoomi scheme of computerizing land records to facilitate the creation of so-called efcient and liberalized ruralurban land markets.) The IFIs are not funding every scheme, but by nancing the newly crafted regulatory apparatuses and essential provisions (such as water and electricity), their work profoundly affects them all. Following the model of regionalized expansion, the BangaloreMysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) intends to redirect development away from Bangalore in order to alleviate urban density in the interior and expand the overall space of Greater Bangalore to include new and old townships, small cities, village clusters and agricultural land. Operated by a US-based investor, NICE (Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises, aka BangaloreMysore Infrastructure Corridor BMIC), this project starts with the construction of a six-lane privately owned toll expressway between Bangalore and Karnatakas second-largest city, Mysore. The 130 km-long expressway will become a catalyst for regional urbanization, with NICE building ve new private townships and multiple industrial parks on agricultural, village and forested land. The projects advertised main goals are to reduce the travel time between the two cities from three and a half hours to 90 minutes, thereby alleviating the crowding of Bangalores IT sector and allowing it to expand geographically. In 2005, Mohandas Pai, then director of human resources at Indias major IT rm Infosys (with large campuses in both cities), said in the press: Its the single most important project for Bangalore. It will not only provide more employment, but also improve the quality of life of the people of Bangalore (Indian Tollways, 2008). At an estimated cost to date of more than US $1 billion, the 7,000 acres required for the toll-based expressway will be surrounded by another 21,000 acres on which NICE can develop these new townships, each afliated with a corporate center, industrial center, farming/marketing center, ecotourism center or heritage center, preserving in a museum setting the rural way of life that the thoroughfare and malls may pave over.
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Besides reducing travel time, it will also denude up to 7,000 acres of forested land and drain eight lakes. The government chose to lease the land at a controversially low price of 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 lease expires, 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 into urban real estate that was the ingredient which attracted the US investor, and one of Indias largest corporations (Anil Ambanis ADAE), to the scheme. Just as New York, Singapore and Dubai real estate rms are winning bids to set up their own townships outside Indias cities, in 2007 a Dubai rm closed a US $15 billion deal (with DLF of Delhi) to build, own, operate and govern a prototype township known as Knowledge City on 9,000 acres surrounding the town of Bidadi, alongside the planned infrastructural corridor (see Forbes, 2007b). In other words, the rural economy leaves the farmers few options but to sell their land at depressed prices to the government, even while 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 acquired from rural denizens, many of whom are engaged in agriculture and live in villages. For a developer to receive 28,000 acres from the state government, states have industrial area development boards (in Karnataka it is KIADB) charged with the task of purchasing land from rural owners and villages, building up basic infrastructure i.e. water, electricity and 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 allowed to sell agricultural land for non-farming purposes, ostensibly to preserve the national treasure of farmland and protect vulnerable farmers from land vultures preying on them. This is especially true for the lowest caste communities that have received land under land-to-the-tiller programs since the 1970s. (Of course, the existence of this land ceiling and land reform legislation does not preclude such things from occurring, and the World 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 MysoreBangalore corridor project people who farm the land, live in the villages and work in rural service and small-industry sectors supporting the regional economy.20 Under the law of eminent domain, based on the British colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, government can acquire land from farmers if it is for a project that is for the good of the nation, but it must offer a fair market price (see DRozario, n.d.). The Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB), however, offers a relative pittance to the non-elite members of rural communities, exercising its right to choose the depressed 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 its governance structure: the black, grey and white markets of real estate brokering and speculation, the mega-deals conjured for new highway, special export zone (SEZ) and township construction, and the new governance system managing these transitional steps toward becoming a world city. One of the signicant bones of public contention is that the original plans and contract with the Bangalore government apparently did not include these non-highway real estate projects, and is being disputed in the courts and by landowners refusing to let the government acquire their land (Saldanha et al., 2007). The rationale for offering farmers such a low price relative to lands new urban value is based on the belief that many of Karnatakas farmers are now relatively poor, in debt and deemed uncompetitive. But this is true less because of the failure of the land, the people 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-based NGO 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 dangerously off-course; see also the hundreds of pages of raw documentation about BMIC irregularities on the website http://www.hiddentruthofbmicp.com).
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shift in priorities by the government in price supports from the rural to the urban service sector. Whereas in the past the government would subsidize agriculture in order to keep both a national food surplus and some of the 70% of the nations population engaged in rural work employed and compensated (some political moments have been better than others), policy since the early 1990s has shifted from rural subsidies and supports, and away from social welfare provisions in general. In other words, world-city investments depend upon the widespread disinvestment from other local economies, such as the diverse rural and the urban informal. Signicantly, most of the urban and rural population works for the multi-faceted informal economy (including textiles, apparels, silk processing, mechanical fabrication, plastic parts manufacturing, oriculture, food processing and a varied service sector), which employs most of the population and generates between 55 and 75% of Bangalores GDP (Benjamin, 2000a; 2000b; 2008). Yet, world-city projects, with their large appetites for under-valued/capitalized land, tend to undermine these small and medium-sized enterprises, as the latters political clout has diminished by comparison. This historical convergence of neoliberalization and world-city urbanization has empowered the new parastatal agencies such as KIADB to become brokers of large-scale public and private land transfers. World-city brokering has become the biggest growth sector for the regional economy.21 The management of this land acquisition process has become the main source of revenue and wealth accumulation in Bangalore today, and the main political tussle amongst the political parties and the parastatal agencies.22 In the lengthy and laborious process of master planning, mapping out the specic plots of land to be acquired, notifying the landowners and handling the land users (i.e. working through the complex web of uncertain landownership rights that often include distant relatives and also generations of non-own land users), and of course the nal purchase and subsequent transfer to the investors, a lot of money exchanges hands. Whereas prot rates in IT have dropped by half since 2006, and have sunken more deeply since the 2009 nancial crisis, the real estate sector continues to grow skywards as it becomes transnationalized. The real estate market in India has grown at 30% per year 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 has dropped substantially in the second half of the year. Unitech, one of Indias largest real estate rms, reported a 3,190% increase in net prots from 2006 to 2007, and its market capitalization grew 11,561%, according to Assocham (the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India). When so much capital oods an industry that requires access to large plots of land, whole new dynamics unfold. In the case of the expanding IT corridor on the southeast periphery of Bangalore, one nds villages such as Bellandur caught in the eye of this storm. In 2002, many of Bellandurs small-landowning farmers refused the price set by
21 Parastatal agencies were created during the burst of large investment capital owing in during the 1960s and 1970s from international nance institutions, which wanted to create parallel agencies not corrupted by local politics and stuck in the perceived inertia of local bureaucracies. They alone could oat municipal bonds and borrow internationally. They were (and remain) not beholden to any constituencies except the states chief minister and the IFIs that created them. Hence, parastatals created their own bureaucratic culture and politics of IFI capital ows and access to privileged government resources. Since the liberalization of the early 1990s, and the latest rise of the real estate industry, these parastatals have increased their local power demonstrably, as this article shows. 22 Remarkably, some of the key beneciaries of these land transactions have been the new class of real estate moguls. In acknowledgement of the fact that the market value and legitimacy of these contentious land acquisitions are often determined, in one way or another, through politics, the biggest 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 recent wealth from the real estate industry. A decade or so back, when such land deals were not a possibility, many of these MLA positions were lled by trade unionists, farmers union activists and progressive political party leaders (interviews with author, 200708; see also Merinews, 2009a).
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KIADB, as their land was fertile, highly productive and alongside a large lake that supplied sh 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 their farm and village land. But those prices were not guaranteed. At that time, the market price ranged from Rs 40 lakhs (1 lakh is Rs 100,000) to Rs 1.5 crores (1 crore is Rs 10 million) per acre (roughly from US $100,000 to US $375,000), and yet KIADB agreed to sell 100 acres (a substantial amount in local terms) to the Indian IT rm Infosys at a much lower at rate of Rs 9 lakhs (US $22,500); in turn, KIADB offered the farmers even less ranging from Rs 3.5 to 6 lakhs per acre (interviews with author, 21 May 2008). This triggered a storm of protest by farmers, and eventually was picked up the press, farmers, activists and politicians. (One village led a claim with the High Court which awarded those farmers Rs 58 lakhs per acre, still a small fraction of the market value but almost ten times more than what KIADB offered.) Over time, many farmers living in the vicinity of the IT corridor being developed have sold off their farmland because of pressure from KIADB, and from the developers offering a better price to expedite the land acquisition process (as large investors awaited to purchase consolidated land tracts). (Village inhabitants who do not have land deeds lose out completely.) Although as recently as a decade ago, Bellandur farmers protably produced cauliower, spinach, rice and coconuts for Bangalore city markets, the acute densication of the area by IT rms has rendered its main water source the once majestic Bellandur lake (the largest in Bangalore) unusable for farm irrigation, contaminated by the untreated toxic industrial and household waste that ows into it (Rediff, 2005; The Times of India, 2006; interviews with author, 21 May 2008). As the new IT thoroughfare cuts right through the villages farmland, and as individual plots of land were sold piecemeal to developers or the government in order to construct IT campuses, farming has become untenable. In the case of the BangaloreMysore Industrial Corridor (BMIC) heading south to Mysore from the southern edge of Bangalore, few public records exist, but a loose-knit group of farmers organizations and NGOs representing the disaffected have documented that a similar process occurs there.23 It is estimated that only a small fraction of the rural denizens notied by the KIADB will be compensated, and compensation will be far below market prices. Many will not be compensated for various reasons: portions of the rural population have difculty proving ownership (especially women and the poor), as 16 different documents are required to prove landownership in a context in which much land is under village or common ownership, and therefore not recognized as valid for compensation. Moreover, plenty of villagers do not own land even though they may lease or be employed by or work on someones (or common/village) land. Some work within the villages as tradespeople, religious workers and overseers of shrines and burial grounds, midwives, shopkeepers, pastoralists, barbers, cobblers and so on. Those who maintain Indian village life are not necessarily landowners. Land tenure relations in Karnataka reect deeply historical, localized, multi-layered and intergenerational sets of informal agreements that have made it possible for laborers, village denizens and small producers 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-dried categories of landowners and non-owners, with only the former worthy of compensation arising from land acquisition for big urban projects, is to further undermine the social and cultural complexity and livelihood strategies of the rural.
23 Political party rivalries have volleyed (substantiated) accusations of large-scale land-grabbing schemes at this project. My colleagues have been conducting interviews in some areas of the corridor, as have staff for the Environmental Support Group (ESG) and farmers organizations gathering data for court actions. 24 Historical land-tenure relations have come under recent scrutiny through the creation of Special Economic Zones throughout India. According to the Delhi-based Citizens Research Collective, more than a million people, mostly agricultural laborers, face eviction as a result of nearly 240 SEZs being approved 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 and protests in the area suggest.25 Since the promotional world-city literature on cities of the future sell social imaginaries, let us too imagine a different scenario: imagine that in the name of development and Indias rising, the 200,000 people who live in the way of urban development were given market value for the land in exchange for their lives being upended i.e. not the depressed land price (such as the Rs 10 or 25 cents per acre per year offered to NICE by KIADB on lease) but the market price that gets generated once Dubai and US real estate rms began to invest their capital. Then the major value component of the scheme making real estate would be socially dispersed amongst the rural denizens. Farmers and non-deed-holding villagers alike could own smaller plots of land along this new expressway to set up shops or small apartment complexes, own a share in the factories and the new townships. Conceivably, they could enjoy a share of the prosperity of these new projects. Their children could afford to build a solid house, own a small business, go to school and be trained in areas other than poorly remunerative work. But then the road builder, US-based NICE, would be reduced to the role of a public-like agency, producing improved infrastructure, housing, transport and commercial sites, and generating income and public spaces for the majority to use. It may sound like development in some abstract romanticized sense, and certainly what the rural poor deserve as their rightful share of India Rising, but this is not how world-city-style development unfolds. Without these forms of high-risk speculation and highly rewarding capital accumulation, neither institutional investors nor IFIs seem interested. In the case of the international airport, the Unique Zurich Airport consortium has received 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 xed the price of land surrounding the airport at Rs 88 lakhs per acre in 2006, it insists that farmers sell at Rs 9.40 lakhs per acre, which are extremely small sums in the context of Bangalores world-competitive land markets. One protest is being waged by Dalit (the lowest caste community) leaders, since Dalits were given some of this land less than 20 years ago to right historic wrongs committed against them (interviews with author, 2 June 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 it for agriculture. Similar to the BMIC toll expressway, it is not the airport with its one runway that will be the protable investment: land is not being acquired for the Unique Zurich consortium to build numerous runways to compete with the worlds largest airports, but to transform the land surrounding it into high-value gated residential communities, seven-star hotel complexes, medical tourism hospitals, and business centers.26 Whose land is being purchased or taken for these world-city transformations, and with what effect on the local economies (especially the de-subsidized rural and farming sectors), are key questions that the development industry and world-city boosters have largely ignored. They are also avoiding the possible causal connections of mass dispossession with the alarming rates of suicide among farmers in rural Karnataka and the growth of slums populated with displaced rural farmers and workers (Sainath, 1996; 2007; 2008; Vasavi, 1999). The unleashing of value for investors purchasing the land around BMIC and the new airport 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 the BMIC, 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) land on which to build a number of state-of-the-art private hospitals for elite tourists wanting expensive surgery procedures for a fraction of the price back home, only one of Bangalores public hospitals had an intensive care unit, with just ve ICU beds for the entire city.
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volatile.27 Those with greater social capital have organized civic organizations to raise their voices about the bad air, noise, trafc, congestion and dirtiness of the city, feeding comfortably into the justication for world-city projects and the promise of Europeanstyle urban amenities. The majority express their concerns about the growing volatility of life in Bangalore through slum-, farmer-, Dalit-, and trade union-based actions of a subdued yet persistent nature.28 Their anxiety over expropriation as world-city ambitions spread is palpable in diverse forms of political anger and action. Some of this political anger 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 lived histories of Bangalore for a long time. In sum, Bangaloreans of all backgrounds must become speculators of one sort or another, taking extreme risks and gambling on when government agents or land brokers (or violent nativist organizations) will tag their possessions next for acquisition. Many feel they must act before it is too late.
We are all brokers now

In an interview, one reputable Bangalore journalist describes an emerging pattern of land churning, propelled by young men on scooters approaching desperate farmers who receive land acquisition notices from KIADB:
Theyre descending on these farmers like locusts. During the day theyll come and offer them a price for their land, already not providing them enough to survive, and by night someone will come and offer them a great deal on a plot of land in Bangalore city itself. And you cant tell me the guy by day and the guy by night arent working together. So farmers are being cheated from all sides. The government refuses to support them through fair-market prices as KIADB forces them to sell at below-market prices, and the real estate guys and developers via their goons want the land so they can turn it over for a hefty prot. After all, these local brokers also imagine they can get a piece of the action, they too want to send their kids to engineering schools like the elites and get IT jobs, not understanding that most are lowly BPO (call center) jobs that cant sustain a family. Meanwhile, the actual buyers are working for a senior minister in Delhi or the chief minister in Karnataka. In other words, there is a long chain of actors participating, 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 off real estate speculation and an IT entrepreneur who needs cheap land. The grey money lters through the new IT rm, 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, including an imagined ten-lane highway, never before seen in India (see Merinews, 2009b). This is for a city where more than two-thirds of the population walks, rides a bike or scooter, or takes public buses to work, according to city transport engineers. As real estate brokers have 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, and various slum dwellers associations have criticized mega-projects like the BangaloreMysore Infrastructure Corridor and the new airport due to contestations over fair compensation for land acquisitions and risks to the environment. The funding structures of these projects also threaten the nancial sustainability of cities starved of funds. The centrally funded JNNURM project, which provides large grants to cities for infrastructure development, risks pushing municipalities into further debt as they take out loans to fund the required 50% of matching funds (see CIVICs 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 in Bangalore, see e.g. RoyChowdhury (2008). 29 This story seems to be common in the villages surrounding the new international airport and along the 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 and poor-peoples landscapes, a urry of money-making opportunities have been created for government actors. From the realtors perspective, government agents are the ones swindling the farmers, and there is plenty of evidence documenting this pattern, including routine news reports of land-grabbing scandals, often documented by legislative and court-ordered inquiries; the largest land-grabbing scandals are blamed on senior government and party ofcials.30 One real estate broker explained to me his reading of the situation: every new law enacted to protect people from being swindled out of their land sets off a whole new set of bribes that deed holders must pay in order to work through the newest layer of regulation, having to pass yet another threshold of the (newly contrived) land bureaucracy maa.31 So much money ows from these land transactions that the three major political parties are now dependent upon this cash, and less likely to accuse the other of land grabbing. As successor to the British, the Indian government inherited a colonial landscape in which it controlled the vast majority of land in and around Bangalore, including more than 80 lakes, major thoroughfares, green belts, parks and boulevards, large military colonies and parade grounds (Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005). Until the late 1980s, state ofces earned their incomes from an array of petty forms of rent collection and maintenance fees; today, in stark contrast, state agents earn their keep (and then some) by turning public (and private) goods into real estate, and real estate has become highly remunerative largely due to this worlding of the Indian city. Two notable features of this historical conjuncture are the phenomenal rise of a new transnational corporate sector (including IT) and the proliferation of interactions among Asian world cities that has fueled a speculative (plug-n-play) climate for super prots across capital-rich world cities such as Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Bangalore. The speculative state tries to adapt and cash in, but in India there follows behind a maelstrom of speculative capital swirling through its cities, destabilizing and reorienting the social and spatial conditions of government. According to Assocham, the Indian real estate market 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 by US $30 billion in the next 5 years. In the third quarter of 2009 alone, more than US $7 billion of foreign direct investment ooded into the latest instrument for foreign speculative 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 200708.32
30 See, for example, the legislative report that created controversy in 2006, Joint Legislature Committee on Encroachment of Lands in Bangalore Urban District. Here is an excerpt from the document: The BMP, BDA, CMCs and the Cooperation Department, to name a few (government ofces), have utterly failed in their duties to protect government and public lands and have become not only helpless, tolerant witnesses but in many cases their ofcials have also become active participants, abettors and promoters of these crimes (which include the theft of more than 8,000 acres of public land). For instance, the Principal Secretary, Revenue Department declared before the Committee that as many as 300,000 bogus Records of Rights have been issued by colluding Revenue Staff [emphasis in original] . . . At this rate, Bangalore will become infamously the Land Grabbing Capital of India while so far it has been known as Indias 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 real estate market, relatively new in India, has quickly become naturalized as a legitimate source of capital accumulation; by contrast, many people forced off this land see the real estate brokers as goons and swindlers. 32 As a completely new investment strategy in 2009, Morgan Stanley with partners set up a US $10 billion 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 press releases and not necessarily actual commitments.
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As Bangalores world-city master plan calls for the incorporation of hundreds of villages and towns on its periphery in order to meet its ambitious growth targets for the next 10 or so years (if achieved, Bangalore will become the third-largest megapolis in the world), it is becoming clear that much more money can be made by turning rural economies into urban real estate for world-city projects than whatever money can be made from the actual projects themselves (BBMP, 2009). Hence, Bangalores new world-city economy is based less on the supposed engines of growth than these worldaltering ones. Looking into the business plans of Indias miraculous IT sector reveals its active participation in a core speculative dimension of world-city making.
The IT engine of growth

Transforming Bangalore into a world city depends on the rather large assumption that its extraordinary IT sector will become a permanent growth machine, and as such can be the collateral for these large loans and long-term investments in urban infrastructure (Parthasarathy, 2004; Dittrich, 2007). With that in mind, it is useful to better understand what fuels Bangalores IT sector and how the major IT rms (e.g. Infosys, TCS, Satyam, Wipro) are re-investing their surpluses and ingenuity. Are they, as the World Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers hope, providing exceptional leadership, innovation and the telematicization of governance the world-classing of the cities of India? More fundamentally, will they be here tomorrow, when the projects are complete and the bills fall due for payment? The dream team of Indian IT started from humble entrepreneurial origins: a few young talents offered Californian computer rms an attractive outsourcing proposition during the Y2K crisis. They could hire Indian software engineers at a fraction of the cost of US and European ones, and x the Y2K problem before the turn of the millennium. As one of its managers has explained to me, Indias premier rm, Infosys, offered to do the tedious job, promising it could pay its workers US $15 per hour and not the US $30 per hour which US rms were paying its local engineers; the edgling Infosys instead paid Indian engineers US $2 and kept US $13, and made millions instantly. Infosys eventually took on other mundane tasks for Northern banks, insurance companies and health rms, coding and data processing on the night shift and cutting the local fee structure substantially. Since the mid-1990s, Infosys has had 4045% revenue growth per year, tapering off to half that in 2007. In 2005, it employed 40,000 workers, doubling to 88,600 by December 2007. Infosys maintains its global market share in every one of its divisions, including Finance, Banking, Aerospace and Defense, Media, Environment, and Insurance. Infosys grew quickly, from a small US $75 million rm, to a US $2 billion rm in 2005, US $3 billion in 2006, and had expected to grow to US $10 billion by 2010, but has slowed to US $4.8 billion in 2010 due to the global downturn. Although the largest competitor is IBM Global, which had revenues of approximately US $40 billion by the mid-2000s, its prot margin is at 15%, whereas Infosys had a 46% margin in 2005, albeit sinking to 28% in 2007 (and much lower by 2009). Only a small percentage of the rms work is BPO or call-center work, most is customer analytics, payroll processing and back-ofce work; for some US rms, Infosys has taken over as much as 70% of their actual work. For mail-order companies (such as Amazon), insurance, nance and 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 rms invest locally, aside from their 70,000 90,000 person workforce and their high consumer spending, these rms are not active investors or innovators. Although world-city advocates argue that IT rms could use their computers and telecommunications to support new systems of state-of-the-art e-governance transparent, democratically accessible, efcient and competitive the
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reality is quite different. As one interviewee explained, today 98% of Infosys work is business from outside India, and 65% is US-sourced. Accenture and IBM Global are its main global competitors. Our offshore rates are too high for local Indian clients, and we make our large prot margins from the difference between our local costs and what Western companies are willing to pay (interview with author, 21 February 2007). We cannot afford to hire ourselves to local governments, he explained, and government agencies really have no use for what we offer. Instead, surpluses are invested in mergers and acquisitions of competitors in Europe and the US. In early 2008, Infosys invested in two major mergers and acquisitions in Europe and Australia to increase its market share and reduce competition, and become more vertically integrated into more arenas of business. Flush with cash during the economic downturn of 2008, Infosys was, according to the business press, looking to buy more undervalued/underperforming European rms (see Vencat, 2008). Domestically, ITs main investment is in real estate, which has now surpassed IT itself as the most protable 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 (by international market standards) public and undervalued private or community land into real estate. Land values have skyrocketed: prices for oor space and per foot plots of land in the central business district increased 160% between 2001 and 2006 (from Rs 2,500 to Rs 6,500 per square foot).33 One of Infosys strategies has been to buy up land in and around Bangalore, Mysore, Chennai, Chandigarh, Pune, Hyderabad, Jaipur and outside Delhi, creating what it calls high-value land banks. According to the 2006 Annual Report of Infosys, creating land banks was a key challenge of the year.34 Besides the 79-acre main campus with pool, golf, amphitheatre, hotel and more than enough ofce space for expansion, they also banked 357 acres near the international airport, 845 acres in Sarjapur on the outskirts of Bangalore, 315 acres in Mysore with a bowling alley and cricket stadium, and 100 acres of paddy elds in rural Bangalore.35 Infosys is not alone. Once the fourth-largest Indian IT rm, the darling of Hyderabad (Cyberbad), Satyams chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted to police in January 2009 that he had set up 275 real estate holding companies in the names of his family members for handling numerous land transactions while lying in Satyams accounting books about more than US $1 billion of non-existent assets.36 While Satyam worked for more than one-third of the Fortune 500 companies in 66 countries, including the World Bank, most of its surplus has been diverted to real estate deals throughout Andhra Pradesh, with close links to the chief minister and large development projects related to Hyderabads emergence as Indias next world city. In a recent public confession, former chairman Raju said he had set up this out-of-control scam not for private gain, but as the only way he saw Satyam could be globally competitive (Aaftaab, 2009). There are a few other noteworthy trends in land-use patterns emerging from the IT sector. First, most foreign IT rms are no longer purchasing land for campuses but are leasing ones built for them through government initiatives and subsidies. Second, and related, the number of SEZ (Special Export Zone) applications for IT ofce parks is increasing (of the 20 SEZs notied in and around Bangalore since 2005, 13 are for IT and IT-enabled services, totaling some 865 acres of land), which means that even more 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 Infosyss Annual Report 2006. For an excellent discussion on the IT industry and its land banks, see Srinivasaraju (2008). 35 Another strategic move by Infosys and others is to invest in their own offshore production sites where labor and operating costs are lower; in the Philippines, for example, hourly wages are half the Bangalore rate. 36 PwC auditors admit to fraud in Satyam case (Asianewsnet, 2009); Satyam chief admits huge fraud (The New York Times, 7 January 2009).
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maintenance costs for IT rms to settle (even temporarily) in and around Bangalore. As time goes on, IT rms are demanding much more in the form of public support than ever before.37 In Bangalore, three-quarters of IT rms lease, and rental space prices more than doubled from 2005 to 2008 in software parks where companies have been allowed to move so as to qualify for tax-exempt status. As one set of tax breaks expires, others are set up due to threats by foreign rms to move out. The proactive government has recently approved sites for 13 SEZs in Karnataka and 11 in Bangalore, with a very attractive tax holiday for leasees. According to Kaustav Roy, Cushman & Wakeeld India director in April 2008, rms would move from STPs (Software Technology Parks with their expiring tax holidays) to SEZs (with their new long-term tax holidays), perhaps within Bangalores newly extended city limits.38 Up until 2008, Indian IT rms were paying very little in corporate taxes (with practically no tax obligations for foreign rms) and the IT sector growth together with IFI-nanced mega-city schemes spurred land values upwards, in some quarters by more than 900%. With Bangalores planners and lenders arguing that, in order to overcome its mega-city problems, Bangalore needs to construct its world-city projects on the underutilized land of the citys old center (where working-class Tamils and Muslims live) and its rural periphery (where farm workers and farmers live), the vulnerable majority are being alienated from the streets and public and shared plots of the city. The social effects of world-city planning in this case exacerbate already tense social divisions as public space and lands shrink in size, use and access. These contradictory processes are unfolding differentially on multiple scales: between urban and rural Karnataka, across the real estate markets of Mumbai and Delhi, and, in new ways, through elite inter-urban networks across key Asian cities. On the one hand, large sums of capital are nancing urban infrastructure and ofce and residential construction. For what seems to be a historic rst, new townships being built outside Bangalore are being owned, developed and governed by real estate and construction rms from other world cities: Dubai (Limitless Properties), Singapore (Asendas Pte Ltd, CPG Consultants, Singapore Piling & Civil Engg Pte Ltd, Jurong Consultants, Keppel Land), the US/New York City (Starwood Capital Group, Coldwell Banker, Cushman & Wakeeld, Morgan Stanley) and Delhi (DLF Building).39 On the other hand, inter-urban speculation coupled with pressure from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank for new liberal technologies of government and security are increasing anxiety and conict (Dufeld, 2001).
37 One clear form of public subsidy is the SEZs (special export zones). As of 2008, the total area under SEZs in India is approximately 200,000 hectares of arable land. Some of these, such as the MahaMumbai SEZ, are the size of small towns (in this case, 100 km2, or the size of Chandigarh). Though accurate displacement numbers are difcult to come by, most estimates indicate a loss of 196,000 farming households and farm-worker families, or about 1,000,000 people. The amount of agricultural incomes lost total Rs 212 crores per year (roughly US $53 million). Since 60% of SEZs are for the IT sector, it is unlikely that any of these new jobs will be lled by displaced agricultural laborers. The losses in public revenues may be even more devastating due to tax exemptions. More difcult to calculate is the public and social cost to dispossessed farming communities underemployed, distressed and ending up in the citys informal housing settlements. 38 Bangalore ofce rentals may fall as IT rms eye SEZs (SiliconIndia.com, 2008). 39 Its 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 condent about the long-term prospects of Indias real estate sector and showcased 11 projects including Bidadi, a 9,000-hectare development near Bangalore which would have housed around 750,000 people. India is currently facing a shortage of some 21 million homes, and more than 300 million people are expected to migrate to urban areas over the next 20 years said Saeed Ahmed Saeed, CEO of Limitless, in the article UAE real estate rms eye Indian opportunities (Arabianbusiness.com, 2008).
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This worlding of Indian cities has triggered shifts in new technologies of government that affect urban and rural people who have given it all up in the name of world-city making. The emphasis here is on what Ananya Roy (2009a) calls a new mode of spatial production, one which transcends the problematic informal/formal dyad: so much of what happens on the ground in Bangalore today is over the question of land, fueled by formal (yet opaque parastatal) state bodies working informally to change land tenure. There is sufcient uncertainty built into these endeavors that the city and its periphery is engulfed by a collective social angst over whether or not ones domicile will be taken over to build the new Metro, widen a road, construct a housing complex or a special export zone. This social anxiety in turn generates large ows of cash as a normal practice to reduce the chances of personal and community bankruptcy, i.e. everyone must pay what s/he can in order to inuence the outcome, even though outcomes are already over-determined by class, caste and gender inequities when it comes to who will get displaced and whose land can be avoided by world-city project planning (Kamath et al., 2008). In Bangalore, rising urban anxiety is not about trafc, congestion, pollution, lth or too few good pubs; the most palpable urban anxiety is focused on ofcial land-theft and the speculative nature of routine decision-making in a rising world city. Even as highly lauded middle-class civic associations hold regular public meetings calling for transparency, participation, accountability and more, drawing up annual report cards on the performance of each government agency, marching in line with the global mandate for audit culture as politics, the omnipresent practices of world-city making land theft and the legitimating governance structure being built up around it are treated as anomalies 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 government

These highly inequitable spatially diffused dynamics are not well explained by new urban theories focusing on the recent shifts experienced in Western cities, moving from an 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-altering capital infusions (i.e. billions of dollars from Dubai, Singapore and the IFIs), they do more than merely facilitate the restructuring of governance institutions for improved access to public goods and services for international capital (i.e. privatization of township governance, special citizenship rights and privileged rules for SEZs). They also trigger new political rationalities of government and technologies of rule that emerge in situ as bureaucrats and political ofcials, brokering jackpot deals for external clients, generate their own rent-seeking mechanisms of world-city wealth redistribution. These politicians also have to manage the desires of the IFIs that are, paradoxically, pushing for national legislation to repeal the archaic land-acquisition laws which allow for this eminent domain strategy, and for government agencies to possibly produce massive land banks for these world-city projects.40 Of course, this is not the rst time local state actors have demanded a piece of the surplus pie, but the magnitude, speed, and the overarching aura of legitimacy of these new governance endeavors locally and worldwide are important to note. Accumulation by (mass) dispossession has become one mandate, as Harvey (2003) observes, coming from global nance capital, supported by the IFIs, and a gritty reality (and realty) emanating from the prevalent global discourses of world-city making, Flat Worldism and India Rising. Through the everyday practices of world-city making, government
40 Thanks to a perceptive IJURR referee for reminding me of this tension.
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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 good of the nation-style development to push small land-users aside in the rush to capitalize on global forms of land speculation. Bangalore is not only becoming less dependent on local denizens, it is also becoming detached from Delhi (seat of Indias central government) and the needs of the rural periphery. Instead, perhaps more than any time in recent history, what happens in Shanghai, 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 in Bangalore for one million; by comparison, land in the rural periphery of Bangalore appeared globally competitive, i.e. dirt cheap. Whether or not EAD builds its Airbus factory, Walmart its string of warehouses, Taj its seven-star hotel, or Dubais Limitless its private township, millions of land users will be displaced and the land will be churned many times over in the process of speculation. Even the middle-class city-core residents feel heightened anxiety about whether they can keep their family home: for every new road or Metro transport project there comes a design for a world-class mall or yover or business park all requiring land far beyond the public use of the project, always justied as necessary for cost recovery and global competiveness, as the IFIs have pushed doggedly for over the past two decades. It is uncertain how many of these projects will be built, and few even among the city leaders have a full picture of which ones are actually being built. Yet it is this state of uncertainty and anxiety that generates increased cash ows, increased risk-taking in urban planning and development, speculative government and the suspension of justice for the dispossessed in the name of world-city making. By December 2008, much of the miraculous side of Asian city real estate value had begun to vanish. As one German realtor in Dubai explained on German TV in February 2009: What real estate market? There isnt 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-bound jumbo jets to y home the low-paid Indian building construction workers, their passports returned to them at the gate. As the leaking real estate bubble in Dubai requires large bailouts from Abu Dhabi, disappearing dollar remittances from construction workers in the Gulf States to local Indian economies severely undercut the Indian governments ability to support its urbanization loans (Human Rights Watch, 2006). At election time in April 2009, senior politicians in Bangalore were asking publicly if the international airport development plan might be scaled back to allow for some dispossessed farmers to regain their land. (It is both a typical campaign strategy and an acknowledgement that cash ows into world-city projects have reversed.) Even before this crisis, reverse ows of urbanism, or what Solomon Benjamin calls occupancy urbanism, have been long occurring (Benjamin, 2008) i.e. unoccupied land under speculation is often re-occupied by small agricultural producers and merchants who are allowed to resume what they had previously been doing, namely farming or trading under highly insecure tenure rights.42 Although not unique, this is one of many coping mechanisms for marginal producers working within the parameters of speculative urbanism. Globally oriented IT rms, however, are the main drivers of this art of speculative urbanism, as many of them also practice an occupancy game: perched on short-term leases in their government-subsidized world-class campuses, and willing to be 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 February 2009). To take just one example in Dubai, 200 luxury residential skyscrapers built on the main harbor from 2004 to 2008 remained empty in 2010. 42 Benjamin is working in many central and peripheral areas of Bangalore; colleagues and I are studying this dispossession process in the airport development area, and following one group to their new homes.
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as their future ones (rm-friendly Hyderabad, Pune, Manila or Shenzhen). Speculative urbanism may be a useful way of describing rms status, as well as that of the state, with which rms are in constant negotiation and leveraging. How can city dwellers imagine, and undertake, long-term place-based urban planning when the major nancial actors have on their side of the bargaining table the ability to be permanently transient? The 200809 global nancial meltdown revealed its world-city manifestations: new parastatal governmental agencies have been created on the basis of international borrowing and municipal bond marketing; they are fueled by speculative international projects and nanced by other world-city real estate ventures. Since the ability of government to provide services and goods is based on rents from these promised external capital ows, when these ows run dry, so do the essential services. (Even as the biggest accomplishment in water delivery service in Bangalore has been a water pipeline to the under-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-ush project at 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 to provide public resources and support. Simone reminds us that most urbanites sustain themselves in spite of the state and without much access to governance structures. Yet in Bangalore, one also nds an art of government that focuses on catching up with the speculative world of real estate by generating new forms of governance informally on the spot, refracting the brightest sparks from the volatile speculative economy, and intervening in peoples livelihood practices in ways that increase their vulnerabilities and risks. Somewhere in the crossre of occupancy urbanism and people as infrastructure, one nds a political rationality of speculative government chasing and participating in world-city making. In this case, real estate becomes the real state and vice versa. During these tumultuous times, the states suspension of basic human and civil rights seems to be permanent (Agamben, 2005). In its determination to catch up with Shanghai and cash in on its own world city, the Indian state aggressively uses the rules of eminent domain 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 reduced to bare life, no longer covered by legal or civil rights that once guaranteed them some access to the city and its resources, and yet are drowning under new legal reforms and the mobilization of old colonial land laws; these state acts have effectively stripped the majority of their rights to the public sphere, the countryside and the city. Indeed, many Bangaloreans are being actively dispossessed as part of the effort to build up a world city based on a speculative imaginary for world-city investors who may just stay away, and for world-city professionals who have yet to come.
Michael Goldman (mgoldman@umn.edu), Department of Sociology and the Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota, 909 Social Sciences Bldg, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.
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Rsum
En Inde, Bangalore passe par un processus de fabrication de ville mondiale. Pour ltudier, cet article examine les projets spciques cette dimension urbaine, les organes para-tatiques qui les grent, le secteur des technologies informatiques en plein essor qui est cens tre le moteur du processus, ainsi que les dynamiques interurbaines qui relient les villes mondiales comme Duba et Singapour. Ces activits sont associes en grande partie lentreprise, particulirement rmunratrice, de transformation des conomies rurales en secteur immobilier urbain. Le gouvernement actuel de Bangalore semploie principalement des oprations de spculation foncire et de dpossession nergique lencontre des populations qui travaillent et vivent dans la zone priphrique rurale, sur les terrains o se btissent les projets de la ville mondiale. Cet tat dexception temporaire, avec la suspension affrente de droits civiques et humains, paralllement son institutionnalisation dans certaines pratiques du gouvernement, rete le passage vers de nouvelles formes de citoyennet, durbanisme, dconomie et de gouvernement spculateur.

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Volume 35.

3 May 2011 55581

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.01001.x

Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City

Introduction: India Rising1

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

BANGALORE (696 sq. kms.)

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

The making of a world-city discourse

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Reterritorializing through world-city projects

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

OUTER PERIPHERAL ROAD COMMERCIAL CENTER

HERITAGE Ramanagaram CENTER

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

We are all brokers now

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

The IT engine of growth

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Conclusion: the art of speculative government

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

Speculative urbanism in Bangalore

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