Each summer from 2016 through 2019, I traveled to India to provide visual documentation for a team of scholars studying the country’s main tech city, Bengaluru (Bangalore). The team of Indian, American, and Indonesian scholars were looking at how Bangalore had been affected by remarkably rapid growth—the city’s population grew from 1 million in 1960 to 11 million in 2010.

 

The scholars investigated, for example, the significant environmental degradation that accompanied growth, in particular the decline of the city’s famed string of contiguous lakes, some of which were drying up, others spewing forth an alarming coat of foam. They also studied the deleterious impact of expansion on small landholders, primarily Dalit people (formerly known as “untouchables”), many of whom were swindled of their property for dirt-cheap prices, or, in some cases, had it appropriated by the government without adequate compensation.

 

Meanwhile, previously public spaces—outdoor markets, parks, shared grazing fields—were increasingly privatized for use by elites as malls, boutiques, and sports venues. Ultimately, the scholars found that real estate rather than tech was the biggest driver of the local economy, and that real estate speculation, not bricks and mortar construction, produced the biggest profits—hence the subtitle of the resulting book (which includes many of my photos): Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Uncertain Futures in Bengaluru (forthcoming in 2024 from University of Minnesota Press). The photos of Bangalore in this section were taken for that project.