Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India
Access the book here (Open Access, Berghahn Books, 2026)
In this talk, Carol Upadhya draws on her recently published book on the new capital city in Andhra Pradesh, India, which traces the imagination, planning and execution of the Amaravati project from 2004 to 2025.
The book examines the political ambition to build a hyper-modern new city in an agrarian landscape and the aspirations, exclusions and conflicts that it produced. Amaravati illustrates how propertied agrarian classes and provincial capital—building on deep-rooted social structures of caste and property—may appropriate and refashion transnationally circulating development models in forging an urban future. Highlighting the reconstitution of caste relations and the values of land as the project unfolded, Upadhya’s presentation will explore the wider political implications of this increasingly hegemonic model of ‘greenfield’ urban development in India.
About the speaker
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, she is co-editor of 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).