"What makes for a livable life, and for whom? Taking Bengaluru, India, as a case study, Camille Frazier probes the meaning of "livability" by exploring the food networks connecting peri-urban farmers and the middle-class public. Examining the varying efforts to reconfigure processes of food production, distribution, retail, and consumption, she demonstrates how these intersections are often rooted in and exacerbate ongoing forms of disenfranchisement that privilege some lives at the expense of others."
"What makes for a livable life, and for whom? Taking Bengaluru, India, as a case study, Camille Frazier probes the meaning of "livability" by exploring the food networks connecting peri-urban farmers and the middle-class public. Examining the varying efforts to reconfigure processes of food production, distribution, retail, and consumption, she demonstrates how these intersections are often rooted in and exacerbate ongoing forms of disenfranchisement that privilege some lives at the expense of others"--
In Bengaluru, India's "IT Capital" and one of its fastest growing cities, an increasing number of middle class residents are growing fruits and vegetables in their private spaces for home consumption. This article examines the motivations and practices of Bengaluru's organic terrace gardeners ("OTGians") in order to understand the possibilities and limitations of urban gardening as a middle class intervention into unsafe food systems and decaying urban ecologies. OTGians are driven primarily by concerns about worsening food quality and safety, and secondarily by the desire to create green spaces that counteract environmental degradation in the city. Like community gardeners in the Global North, they understand urban gardening as a way to mediate problems in the contemporary food system and the urban ecology. However, like other alternative food and environmental movements, OTGians' efforts are anchored in class-specific concerns and experiences. While they have been successful in creating a vibrant community, their efforts remain limited to the middle class. This is in large part due to the site, scale, and production practices that anchor their interventions. I briefly consider a different approach to food production in Bengaluru—that of a caste-specific farming community that has been dispossessed of much of its agricultural land in the name of urban development—to illuminate divergent histories, narratives, and practices of urban agriculture. However, I also emphasize the sites of intersection between these narratives, and suggest that OTGians can find commonalities with other food producers in the city in ways that might revolutionize Bengaluru's food future. I thus look for potential sites of collaboration and intersection in understanding the uneven power relations and politics of urban socio-natures.
In Bengaluru, India's "IT Capital" and one of its fastest growing cities, an increasing number of middle class residents are growing fruits and vegetables in their private spaces for home consumption. This article examines the motivations and practices of Bengaluru's organic terrace gardeners ("OTGians") in order to understand the possibilities and limitations of urban gardening as a middle class intervention into unsafe food systems and decaying urban ecologies. OTGians are driven primarily by concerns about worsening food quality and safety, and secondarily by the desire to create green spaces that counteract environmental degradation in the city. Like community gardeners in the Global North, they understand urban gardening as a way to mediate problems in the contemporary food system and the urban ecology. However, like other alternative food and environmental movements, OTGians' efforts are anchored in class-specific concerns and experiences. While they have been successful in creating a vibrant community, their efforts remain limited to the middle class. This is in large part due to the site, scale, and production practices that anchor their interventions. I briefly consider a different approach to food production in Bengaluru—that of a caste-specific farming community that has been dispossessed of much of its agricultural land in the name of urban development—to illuminate divergent histories, narratives, and practices of urban agriculture. However, I also emphasize the sites of intersection between these narratives, and suggest that OTGians can find commonalities with other food producers in the city in ways that might revolutionize Bengaluru's food future. I thus look for potential sites of collaboration and intersection in understanding the uneven power relations and politics of urban socio-natures.
Ethnographic representations of the country and the city in India have changed drastically in the last hundred years. Pre-Independence ethnographies of India focused primarily on the village as a self contained and self-sustaining unit, and connections to the outside world were left largely unexamined. With Indian Independence in 1947, the village became a site of rapid change, and the city began to figure as the source of that transformation. Urban-rural interactions became key to understanding the social, economic, and political transformations ethnographers were attempting to explain. In the tradition of Raymond Williams' The Country and the City (1973), this paper explores the emerging relationship between urban and rural India as witnessed through mid-20th century ethnographic representations of village India. In engaging these ethnographies both as sources of empirical evidence and particular forms of knowledge production, this paper gives historical context to conceptualizations of rural and urban India that continue to inform contemporary approaches to issues such as urbanization and rural development.
This dissertation traces the fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain that connects farmers with urban consumers in Bengaluru (Bangalore), India in order to illuminate broader transformations in the city and its agrarian periphery resulting from rapid urbanization. Food ecologies offer a site to describe, critique, and address the moral and material effects of urban development, from food safety scares to the insecurities of agricultural livelihoods. However, these critiques and the projects that they motivate are anchored in class-specific experiences. In this dissertation, I focus on the aspirations and insecurities of the middle and upper classes that guide many contemporary interventions into Bengaluru's food supply chain. I present results from eighteen months (June 2014 - January 2016) of ethnographic field research in Bengaluru and nearby farming communities in order to analyze two ongoing projects: one, the creation of new intermediary forms that establish "direct" supply chains, and two, city residents' attempts to bypass food markets altogether by growing their own food. In Part I, I analyze the market logics and ethical ambiguities that guide contemporary interventions into the intermediary positions in the supply chain. These interventions, promoted and enacted by governmental and non-governmental actors alike, are rooted in an ideology of market efficacy and a belief in India's increased economic abundance. Despite language that positions newly established corporate forms—contract farming companies and farmer-producer companies—as "free market" enterprises that are uninhibited by the stifling effects of "middlemen," the relationships that characterize longstanding forms of agricultural production, distribution, and retail remain critical. In Part II, I consider producers' and consumers' understandings of the changing food supply chain, focusing on the aspirations, insecurities, and class inequalities embedded in shifting production and consumption practices. I show that the primary beneficiaries of the interventions described in Part I are members of the middle and upper classes. In Part III, I examine efforts among urban professionals to rework their relationship to the city's food ecology by growing food themselves. For these individuals, gardening offers an ethical alternative to more common forms of work and leisure among the urban middle and upper classes.
