The Amaravati Project: Augury of India’s Urban Future?

The talk draws on Upadhy's recently published book on the new capital city in Andhra Pradesh, India, which examines the political ambition to build a hyper-modern “greenfield city” in an agrarian landscape and the aspirations, exclusions, and conflicts that it spawned. The Amaravati project, buoyed by hype but punctuated by multiple contradictions and ambiguities, illustrates the predicament of urban planning in India, where propertied agrarian classes and regional capital—building on deep-rooted social structures of caste and land control—may appropriate and refashion development models emanating from national and transnational scales, and adopt novel modes of accumulation based on land assetization, in forging new futures for themselves. The
question for discussion is, what kind of urban future will this form of development create for India?

Bio:
Carol Upadhya is Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies,Bengaluru, India, where she heads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. In addition to her new book Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India (Berghahn Books, 2026; Open Access downloadable at: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/UpadhyaUrbanizing), she co-edited Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru with Vinay Gidwani and Michael Goldman (University of Minnesota Press, 2024; Yoda Press, 2025) and authored Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016).

This talk is sponsored by The Institute for Global Studies, Department of Sociology, Department of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, Department of Anthropology, Department of Geography, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change.