[CSH-CPR Urban Workshop #196] Amaravati and India’s Urban Future (C. Upadhya)
The Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) & Centre for Policy Research (CPR)
are pleased to invite you to an Urban Workshop N°196
by
Carol Upadhya
(Social Anthropologist, Honorary Visiting Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru)
on
Amaravati and India’s Urban Future
on
Tuesday, 30 June 2026, at 3:45 pm IST onwards
The event will be held online via Zoom
About the talk:
The talk will provide an overview of Carol Upadhya’s new book, Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India (Berghahn Books, 2026).
Based on over ten years of field research on the Amaravati capital city project in Andhra Pradesh (2014 to 2025), the book traces the planning, execution, abandonment and subsequent resurrection of the ambitious plan to build a hyper-modern ‘greenfield city’ in a populated agrarian landscape. Focusing on the responses of local communities, the talk will explore why most landowning households agreed to surrender their land for this mega-project. The discussion will trace the social consequences of the project for different caste and class groups living in the 29 villages encompassed by the master plan, highlighting the disruptions and conflicts that erupted as agricultural land was converted into urban real estate via the land pooling scheme. Through the story of Amaravati, the talk will pose larger questions about India’s current infrastructure- and urbanization-focused development trajectory, the entanglements of urban planning with speculative real estate markets, and policy models that hinge on the assetization of land.
Speaker:
Carol Upadhya, a social anthropologist, is Honorary Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India, where she heads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Upadhya’s latest publication is an ethnography of the imagination and development of Amaravati, a greenfield city project in Andhra Pradesh, titled Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India (Berghahn Books, 2026). She is co-editor of a collaborative volume on Bengaluru’s transformations, 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). She has published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Urbanisation, Economy and Society, Contemporary South Asia, and Economic and Political Weekly and co-edits the Journal of South Asian Development (SAGE).
This is the one hundred and ninty sixth (196) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on the city’s development issues and address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society, and politics. For further information, please contact: Rama Devi at ramadevi2487@gmail.com, Champaka Rajagopal at champaka@cprindia.org or Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org.
