Tracking Bengaluru’s dramatic urban transformation through the entanglements of finance, land frenzy, real estate volatility, and livelihood upheavals

Over the past two decades, Bengaluru’s exploding real estate sector and massive infrastructure investments have led to land speculation targeting working-class neighborhoods and agricultural land for development. Chronicles of a Global City turns Bengaluru inside out to examine its “world-city” transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. Moving the spotlight away from the urban elites and “new middle class,” this book explores how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change in Bengaluru—from construction laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, and platform delivery workers to small-time property brokers, petty landlords, and local politicians—experience, struggle, aspire, invent, strive, and speculate to make a livable city for themselves.

Grounded in long-term ethnographic research and activist experiences, Chronicles of a Global City vividly illuminates the multifaceted entanglements of finance capital, real estate markets, livelihood struggles, and fraying ecologies in urban and peri-urban Bengaluru. Its anchoring concept, “speculative urbanism,” provides a powerful, innovative lens for understanding the risk-laden practices of leveraging land, labor, and resources for the promise of future profit.

Contributors: Hemangini Gupta, Pierre Hauser, Priyanka Krishna, Eesha Kunduri, Kaveri Medappa, Usha Rao, Shaheen Shasa, Swathi Shivanand, Vinay K. Sreenivasa.

Hidden Empire of Finance follows the rise of new global cities, tracing their roots back to the 1970s global proliferation of neoliberalism and following their fate in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. As India, China, and other nations sought to develop urban infrastructures that could compete with western hubs like New York, Paris, and London, large-scale flows of capital intruded into national economies to speculate on the growing real estate market. A web of opaque financial products, such as collateralized debt and real estate investment trusts, became alternative vehicles for the speculators’ investments, resulting in vast networks of public goods and services that are now owned and controlled by major financial firms located oceans away. Michael Goldman shows that speculative urbanism relies on dispossession and the racialization of institutional practices to fuel finance's insatiable appetite for capital, determining the ways cities across the global South and North are governed.

The latest book by noted critic and scholar Michael Goldman provides fresh and unexpected insights into the role played by genre in the experience of drama. Challenging the view that genre is by definition exclusion, and that its policing of boundaries is out of place in the neighborhood of art, Michael Goldman suggests that the lens of genre can provide keen insights for our understanding and appreciation of drama. For Goldman, it is important to consider drama as an exper-ience, an ongoing moment-to-moment process for audiences or readers. Everything changes, says Goldman, when we stop to think of genre as not entirely unlike rhyme or ambiguity--features whose primary interest for readers or audiences is as something that happens to us in a poem or play, as it happens. It is valuable to see that--as it operates in drama--the instability of the subject of genre has a specific and unique texture, one that can offer useful insights into our experience as viewers of and participants in drama. In this light, discussions of genre can help us to understand what drama as a special kind of social practice does for and with our lives. It is important that we work toward understanding the process of thinking about drama in this light--that we understand the power and complexity of drama--and Michael Goldman aims to do so in this book. Michael Goldman is Professor of English, Princeton University. He is author of a number of books, including Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama, Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear, and The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama.