Camille Frazier - Urban (Un)Livability: Shifting Food Networks and Uncertain Futures in India's IT Capital

With its emergence as India’s IT Capital, Bengaluru [Bangalore] has experienced exponential growth since the early 1990s. As agricultural fields give way to highways and empty residential plots, 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 that destabilize estimations of present and future wellbeing. I capture this tension by examining efforts to reconfigure fresh fruit and vegetable supply chains to address middle class concerns and desires, both experienced and imagined. Food networks figure as sites wherein the effects of a rapidly-developing metropolis are embodied, narrated, and critiqued. Whether through urban gardening workshops or corporate claims-making about “direct” 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’s food network highlight the embodied uncertainties of urban transformation and estimations of current and future wellbeing in South Asia and beyond.