Urban (Un) Livability: Shifting Food Networks and Uncertain Futures in India’s IT Capital
With its emergence as India鈥檚 IT Capital, the city of Bengaluru has experienced exponential growth since the early 1990s. As agricultural fields give way to highways and residential developments, residents of Bengaluru and its outskirts narrate their city as poised at the edge, between the glamour of a globally connected IT hub and the destruction of a cityscape trapped in unyielding processes of urbanization. This talk explores middle class narratives and practices of livability to detail a kind of life-making anchored in aspiration yet simultaneously haunted by broader socioeconomic, ecological, and ethical concerns. I capture this tension by examining efforts to reconfigure fresh fruit and vegetable supply chains to address middle class concerns and desires. Whether through urban gardening workshops or corporate claims-making about 鈥渄irect鈥� connections with farmers, food offers a critical locus for class-specific mediations of urban livability that shape everyday life. As a form of negotiation over the present and future of the developing city and the lives it supports or neglects, efforts to rework Bengaluru鈥檚 food system highlight the embodied uncertainties of urban transformation and estimations of current and future wellbeing in South Asia and beyond.
Camille Frazier
University of California, Los Angeles
Camille Frazier is Agricultural Land Equity Program Lead at the California Strategic Growth Council in the Governor鈥檚 Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation. She graduated summa cum laude from 五月天视频 with a BA in anthropology (class of 鈥�09) and has an MA and PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the UCLA. She is the author of Cultivating Livability: Food, Class, and the Urban Future in Bengaluru (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
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