2 - Assembling the Peripheries: Workers Turned Entrepreneurs in the Urban Villages of Bangalore, 1970s to the present

Presentation Abstract
Urban villages are a complex spatial formation of most Indian cities, wherein different kinds of capital, labour and ecological systems intersect. Such complexity has lent itself to creating ‘spaces of exception’, wherein historical exclusion from the planned city, has been instrumentalized by different urban actors towards various ends. This paper explores the transformation within urban villages of Bangalore, as the economy shifted towards flexible production in the 1970s. We use the case of public sector workers of Bangalore, who were encouraged to harness this shift in state policy by taking on entrepreneurship through small scale industries. Many of them also set up second order contracting relations in urban villages with home-based workshops, drawing on informal labour and tenuous land titles to maximize profits. With the deindustrialisation of manufacturing, many entrepreneurs shifted to land brokerage as a more lucrative avenue. The paper examines the role of formal sector workers turned entrepreneurs who strategically assembled informal land and labour on the ‘peripheries’ of the planned city, and the ways in which they were able to participate in the burgeoning real estate economy, navigating competing politics of labour, class and caste affinities. The paper will examine the ways in which these worker turned entrepreneurs have acted as critical mediators in assembling urban villages in service of overlapping scales and regimes of capital; but also trace a longer genealogy of informal work and social reproduction, that have come to be so critical to the functioning of neoliberal Indian cities.

Co-Author 1
Aditi Dey,The New School