The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century

Bangalore’s recent emergence as a metropolis and its internationally acknowledged status as India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ has made the city known the world over. This book, a social history of Bangalore’s twentieth century, traces the city’s sudden rise to metropolitan status and the consequent shaping of urban space and citizenship. Complemented by over sixty black and white photographs, old and new, that capture the city’s many moments, and highlight the consequences–for the physical form of the city and for its social life–of urban growth that was telescoped into a period of five decades. Janaki Nair analyses how the city has been shaped by ideologies and principles of planning, instrumentalities of the law, and by the mobilization of ‘City Beautiful’ aesthetics. She also discusses the unanticipated uses of space that fashion a city quite different from the one envisaged by planners and technocrats revealing ways in which citizenship and democracy are being reconceptualized. Drawing upon a variety of methods and materials, both official and unofficial, the volume provides important insights on the particularities of Bangalore’s recent growth, as well as elements it shares with other Indian cities. This work of contemporary urban history will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and urbanization specialists, as well as scholars working on contemporary India.