Guest Lecture Prof Dr Carol Upadhya

We welcome you to a special lecture and book talk:

“Constructing the Future: A Greenfield City Project in Rural South India”

by Prof Dr Carol Upadhya (National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India)

Date: 2 November 2026
Time: 12.15 – 13.45

Venue: Room 151, Oettingenstrasse 67, LMU Munich, Munich 80538.

Abstract:
The talk draws on my recently published book on the planned 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 dissonances of state planning in contemporary India, where dominant agrarian classes and regional capital—rooted in long-standing structures of caste and land control—may appropriate and refashion transnationally circulating urban planning models and future imaginaries. The presentation will focus on the effects of the land pooling scheme that was deployed by the state to acquire land for the project, which dramatically altered the values and meanings of land through assetization and encouraged farmers to refashion themselves as propertied urban citizens. The Amaravati story exemplifies several currents of change that are underway in rural India, as well as the risks and exclusions induced by the current urban- and infrastructure-centric policy regime, which pays little heed to questions of inequality and social justice in its pursuit of ‘development’ and modernity.

Prof Dr Carol Upadhya is Honorary 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) she recently 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). Upadhya is also the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016).