Episode 54 - Carol Upadhya

The Rise and Fall of the Amaravati Greenfield City Project

Theme: Cities as Mega-Projects

Published: 26 January 2024

Summary
This SCAS Talks episode features Carol Upadhya discussing the rise and fall of Amaravati, a planned greenfield city in Andhra Pradesh, India. Intended to be a modern, economically-boosting urban center, the project ultimately failed due to political shifts, financial constraints, and land acquisition complexities. Upadhya's research highlights the project's flawed land pooling system, which burdened farmers with risk despite voluntary land contributions. The episode also explores the broader issues of mega-city development in the Global South, emphasizing the importance of community engagement and sustainable practices beyond infrastructure-centric approaches. The failure of Amaravati serves as a cautionary tale for future large-scale urban development projects.

Keywords
Amaravati project, infrastructure, greenfield cities, urbanization

Suggested Link/s
Personal website: https://cms.nias.res.in/people/people/carol-upadhya External link, opens in new window.

Transcript of the Episode

Carol Upadhya 00:10
Amaravati was being touted as India's first fully planned city to be built in several decades. The last time this was attempted was immediately after independence in the 1950s. The plan was to create a very ultra modern, you know, fully planned, well organized, environmentally friendly greenfield city, which would avoid the many problems of existing cities. But importantly, it was also designed to become the injured of economic growth for the state. And this is the other part of this kind of policy framework, which is that if you invest in urbanization, you're also investing in economic growth.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:53
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode, I talk to Carol Upadhya, visiting professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India. She was a fellow at SCAS during the spring of 2023. Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist, and has researched and published widely on a range of social transformation in contemporary India related to economic development, urbanization and migration. In this episode, we will talk about her research on the imagination, planning, execution and collapse of the world city mega project Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh, India. And this is the first episode on our theme "Cities as Mega-Projects". Very welcome to SCAS Talks, you are joining us by a distant call from India. Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Carol Upadhya 01:55
Thank you very much for inviting me for this podcast. I can start with a little bit of background. I am American, and I come from the US, but I have been living and working in India for more than 40 years, and I was trained as a social anthropologist, but my work draws on several different disciplines. Most recently, I have been looking at various aspects of urbanization in India, especially since the 1990s when economic reforms were brought in, and which really set India onto a new kind of a growth path with various important political and policy changes.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:32
You mentioned a little bit already, very briefly, what is your research about?

Carol Upadhya 02:37
Broadly, we look at urbanization, as I said. The book project that I was working on as a fellow at SCAS was, as you said, about the rise and fall of a mega project, which was the new capital city for the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Amaravati. I began research on this project from the time it was announced in 2014 and then I followed its development over a period of five years by going to the field periodically, up till about 2019. At that point, the project stalled because there was a change of government. I will explain that a bit later, but I continue to do research in that area up to 2022 to understand the implications of this collapse. Of course, I couldn't do much fieldwork during the covid pandemic, and there was a strict lockdown in India. But overall, I had this kind of longitudinal database that I produced on this project, which I think is quite unique, with hundreds of interviews and observational notes and so on, and that's what forms the basis of the book that I'm working on. The book is tentatively titled "Land futures, plotting development in a South Indian mega project". And in the book, I explore the imagined future that was promised by this very hyper modern planned city that was envisioned, especially focusing on the experiences of the people living in the villages that were encompassed in the master plan, and following how the values of land and the meanings of land changed as a rural landscape was transformed by this kind of planned urbanization.

Natalie von der Lehr 04:16
Very interesting. We will get into a lot more details of this later. Why is it relevant to study the rise of these mega cities?

Carol Upadhya 04:25
Well, it's often mentioned in various kinds of World Bank reports and so on that we know that the world's population is urbanizing very rapidly, and it's estimated that about half of the world's population today lives in cities, but by 2050 it'll be nearly three quarters, and much of this growth is taking place in the global south and especially in megacities such as Bangalore. Megacity actually is defined as cities with a population of more than 10 billion. So for a long time, it's been a major concern of international development agencies and national governments about how to manage this kind of rapid urban growth in an equitable and sustainable way. And we know that in exploding cities like Bangalore or say, Jakarta in Indonesia, which is another city that we've studied in our program, there are many challenges for policymakers and urban planners and for ordinary citizens, right from the proliferation of informal settlements, or, you know, commonly referred to as slums, housing inequality and environmental issues such as air pollution, traffic congestion and so on. So one of the major ways in which international policy makers have sought to address these issues is by promoting massive infrastructure investment. And this is a kind of a policy prescription that's come out of international agencies like the World Bank. The idea being that if you invest enough to improve the infrastructure in these cities, then not only will it make life more livable, but also it will attract capital investments, which will then help economic development. So this model of global urbanism, of course, has many versions, but it's variously tagged as smart cities, green cities, livable cities, and so on. And this is a kind of a policy prescription that's been traveling around the globe, and it has influenced urban development policies across many countries, including India. And we do see these ideas reflected in the way in which the Amaravati plan was drawn up, which I'll also speak about in a minute. Amaravati was being touted as India's first fully planned city to be built in several decades. The last time this was attempted was immediately after independence in the 1950s. The plan was to create a very ultra modern, you know, fully planned, well organized, environmentally friendly greenfield city, which would avoid the many problems of existing cities. But importantly, it was also designed to become the injured of economic growth for the state. And this is the other part of this kind of policy framework, which is that if you invest in urbanization, you're also investing in economic growth.

Natalie von der Lehr 07:06
So let's get into some more details then about Amaravati. What were the reasons for planning of this city?

Carol Upadhya 07:14
So the state where it's located, Andhra Pradesh, was a very large state that was divided or bifurcated in 2014. The reason for that was that in one region of that state, which is called Telangana, there was a long standing agitation, political movement to form a separate state, for reasons I won't go into. Hyderabad, which was the capital of the undivided state, is located within Telangana region, and so it remained in the new state of Telangana. And that left residual Andhra Pradesh, which retains the same name without a state capital. And moreover, Hyderabad is India's sixth largest city. It's a very major metropolitan city, and it was the major source of revenue for the undivided state. This meant that the residual AP did, does not have a city of equivalent size, and that means it lost a lot of the economic impetus that it had when when Hyderabad was part of the state. As soon as the bifurcation was announced and it was carried through, the discussions began about where to locate a new capital city, and the geography of this was important, because the truncated state now had a very elongated shape. It stretches along the eastern coast of India, but it's fairly narrow. It has a coastline of almost 1000 kilometers. So that meant that wherever you locate the capital, ideally it should be within kind of centrally located, within reach of most of the people.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:39
And now are we talking about the expansion of an already existing city or the construction of an entirely new city, a so called greenfield city?

Carol Upadhya 08:49
So the idea of a greenfield city option is there, is out there, especially for capital cities, and that is what the new chief minister of Andra wanted to do. I'm mentioning him by name, because he's very, a very important figure in this whole story. The newly elected government in 2014 was headed by Chandrababu Naidu, who was the head of the Telugu Desam Party. And as a figure in the story, he's very important because this was the second time he became chief minister of the state. In the earlier period when he was a chief minister between 1995 and 2004 he was known as an economic reformer, and he was also the architect of converting or changing Hyderabad into one of the major hubs of India's IT industries, which it's known for now. He has this reputation as a very dynamic leader, an economic, you know, neoliberal reformer, who can bring about development through these kinds of projects. He built a whole new area of the city outside of Hyderabad, which is called Cyberabad. So his desire, his plan, or ambition, was to build another, a better city, a new greenfield city, a new fully planned city that would be better than Hyderabad and would serve as a similar kind of a purpose in terms of economic modernization. He pushed for the greenfield city option, and that's what they decided to do. So after a lot of debate about where the new capital would be located, that's another long story, because obviously every region was contesting with every other one to become the site, because then there's a lot of economic benefits you get from that. They finally selected a site in an area called Guntur district, which is more or less in the geographic center of the state, but it was very important that they chose a site right on the bank, on the banks of the Krishna river. Krishna river is one of the major rivers in India, and on the other side of the river, just across the river from the new capital site is the state's second largest city, called Video order. So they kind of did both together. They wanted to plan a greenfield city, a new city, but at the same time it is very closely linked to this old city. So there are certain kinds of economic and logistical dynamics that could be taken advantage of. To build this, what he called his dream project - and this is another very interesting part of the story - Naidu requested the government of Singapore to design the master plan for free. He had already very good relations with Singapore. And as listeners might know, Singapore is widely considered in Asia as a model of a well planned and a well governed city, and planning agencies and city in Singapore, such as the Center for Livable Cities, actually do a lot of consulting work across different Asian countries, helping them to revitalize or to build new cities, and that includes China, India and other countries. Singapore agreed to help, and they because Singapore consultants came in to design the master plan for Amaravati.

Natalie von der Lehr 11:40
What more was unique to this project?

Carol Upadhya 11:43
It's a bit ironic that this project was called a greenfield city project. When planners talk about greenfield, it means that it's an area without much of anything existing, so there is easy to develop and to build on. But this was not greenfield in that sense, it was a populated rural area, is a populated rural area where most of the land was under cultivation. The zone that was marked out covered an area of 217 square kilometers and encompassed 29 villages with a population of around 100,000. And of the 22,000 hectares that were covered in the master plans, around 15,000 hectares was privately held agricultural land. What you see there is really a very typical rural agrarian landscape with a lot of farming, a lot of villages, and this was an entire area that the government wanted to take over to build a new city. So obviously that creates a problem, and that is the number one problem with all these mega projects in India and elsewhere is how to acquire the land, especially when you're targeting such a large area. So what the state government did was, instead of going for compulsory land acquisition, which is what is normally done, where the government actually has the right to invoke the power of eminent domain and take your land and give some compensation. Instead, they decided on a land pooling system, where, theoretically, the farmers would hand over their land voluntarily, and instead of getting compensation in the form of money, what they got in return is a smaller plot of land in the new city. And so the logic of land pooling is that, first of all, it allows the government to acquire a fairly large amount of land, some of which is used to build a project, some of which is handed back to the owners in the form of these smaller plots, and some of which is then sold and it's monetized. So that helps to raise finance which the project needs. And so that's what they did. They formulated a scheme like this, and then they managed to convince most of the farmers to participate in this land pooling scheme.

Natalie von der Lehr 13:47
How come that the farmers and landowners actually agreed to this?

Carol Upadhya 13:50
It's a very interesting question, and it's also one of the key questions I look at in the book. And especially if we think of it against the background of what's been happening in India for the last two or three decades, which is that as more and more infrastructure and mega projects are being initiated and land is required, there have been massive protests and battles around land acquisition, where in most cases, farmers have organized and resisted being displaced in this manner. So Amaravati was a case where they managed to get the land with very little, or, you know, very less conflict. It's also the case that in the Amaravati villages, we have to look at, you know, who are the landholding households. One thing is that in this area, the majority of villages are actually in what's called the uplands. And they are dry lands that are basically have rain fed agriculture, so it's not very productive. The farmers were getting maybe one crop a year. So it's not highly productive agricultural land. It's only in a few villages close to the river where there was very good agriculture going on and it was more profitable. So one thing is that many farmers really began to look at it as a good deal. It was a situation where farming was not giving much of an income, and it was getting worse. Agriculture is, anyway, in a crisis in India. But there's another element here I should mention, and in India we can't not mention the question of caste. Caste plays a very important role in this whole project in several ways. One important thing is that in this particular region, the Guntur and the larger coastal region, the major, what we call dominant caste in sociology, that is the most economically, politically powerful caste that also controls much of the land, they're called Kammas. They are largely supporters of the ruling party at that time, that was the telegradation party, and of Chandrababu Naidu, who also belongs to that community. And so the cast connection played an important role in getting farmers to cooperate. If it had been put in a different region, this would not have been the case. But at the same time, the farmers were not simply blindly, you know, going and agreeing with what the government had suggested. I followed this process over a space of about a year where the government was basically reaching out to the farmers, constantly setting up meetings in the villages to explain the plan, and the farmers started negotiating back with the government, basically trying to get a better compensation, a better what's called the package, how much land they would get back. I wanted to mention here also that one of the things the government did to convince farmers, they actually organized trips to Singapore for groups of farmers to take them there and show them what the new city would look like in future. Because these are, you know, rural people who probably have never moved out of that area. Maybe they've been to Hyderabad or Delhi once or twice. So I thought it was interesting that, you know, they shepherded all these farmers to Singapore to sell them this imagination of a new future which they could have if they cooperate.

Natalie von der Lehr 16:48
Can you tell us a little more how the farmers organized themselves?

Carol Upadhya 16:54
Now they had become stakeholders in the project. They formed a new political constituency you can say. Not that they were not political before, but now there was a whole new set of interests around which they had to organize. So they actually created organizations to, you know, bargain with the government about what was happening. And they also very closely followed the progress of the project as it was being implemented. They didn't just sit back and wait for things to happen, because now their future was tied up with the future of those plots that they received as compensation, and the future value of that plot, or those plots, depended on whether the city develops or not. Because obviously, if someone gives you a little piece of land in the middle of nowhere, it has no value. Once the city grows, it will have a lot of value. So many of these farmers, I mean, they were constantly, you know, in touch with the development agency. They were constantly watching the progress of the work in their villages. They were constantly keeping tabs on the progress of infrastructure development, like the building of roads and other things. So I found all of that really fascinating, because from being kind of very, you know, ordinary, you know, village based farmers and just worrying about their crop and their land. Suddenly, I found these farmers were becoming experts in things like road laying and road alignment. And I would go meet them. They would talk to me about the quality of concrete and cement and all these things you know, that they had never been engaged with before It was an interesting kind of story of urbanization happening almost not just from top down planning, but kind of also from bottom up, as the farmers became involved in this whole process.

Natalie von der Lehr 18:41
So what happened next, and where's the project now?

Carol Upadhya 18:44
One thing I want to point out or talk about before we get into what happened, is, it's very important to understand and one crucial feature of land pooling, which is that, as I said, the compensation that UBC for giving up your land depends entirely on the value of the plot you get right? And at the moment, those plots are basically not even existing. They exist on paper. So you have a right to, you know, X number of plots of Y size, and you have a certificate for that. But on the ground, those developments, housing developments where the plots will be located are not yet made. They're only on the map, and that is why, as I said, the land pooling farmers were following the progress of the project very closely, because they knew that if it doesn't develop, then their plots will not have value. And that was the key, like point of contention between them and the government, was that trying to push this to happen much faster. But at the same time, the development of the city and a project of this type depends on many other factors, which are not always under the control of the government. As you can imagine, there's a whole lot of work to be done to turn an agrarian area into a city where, you know, leveling of land, creation of roads, creation of flood control works, drainage. All kinds of things had to be done. And here the main problem was finance. How do you finance all of this? As it is, the state was very short of money. So basically, what I want to say about this is, if you look at it from that perspective, land pooling is really a speculative mechanism of acquiring land. It's speculative because the farmers are not getting a fixed compensation. The compensation depends on what the plot will be worth in the future, which nobody really has any way of knowing. They can only hope and project. And that means that the risks of the project are really being borne by the farmers and not by the government, because they are gambling with the land. They have given away the land for any land farming family in India is the main asset which they have. It's the most important form of wealth. So people don't give it up easily. So having given it up, they're basically in a situation where they have very little control over what happens in the future. And so that speculative aspect of the project really became clear. And coming back to your question, it became clear in 2019 when the next election was held. Election are held every five years in India, and that government, headed by Chandra Baba Naidu, was voted out, and a new party, new government came in. And this new government did not want to continue the project, for mainly political reasons, because the leader of that party and Naidu were arch political rivals. And of course, there are many reasons why they may not have wanted to do it, but what most people feel is that if the new chief minister had continued to develop this new capital, then for him, there would be no credit. All the credit would still go to Chandababu Naidu. So there's a kind of political, you know, egoism going on here and competition, plus the fact that the government had no money, and this new government, in order to get elected, had made many promises to the people of new social welfare schemes. It had committed a lot of resources to those schemes, and didn't want to, like, pump more money into this project. So basically what happened is that the new government came, it went slow on the project. And I think everyone, the investors and others who were there, realized very quickly that this was not going to continue. And they started to pull out. The World Bank had promised a large loan. They pulled out. Asian Infrastructure Bank pulled out. And then there was a Singapore based consortium that had made an agreement to develop what was called the startup area of the city, which would have really kick started the whole project. They pulled out having invested a million dollars or so, and so basically the project began to collapse. And the new government then also floated this idea that, why should we have a capital city, just one in one place. Let's have what's called a distributed capital with the different functions in different parts of the state. So administrator functions here, legislator there, you know, courts over here, and so that is the plan that they have been working on now is like, you know, moving different government offices to different parts of the state. So that was the kind of final blow to the whole project. If you were to go there today, what you would see is this kind of very large landscape of fallow fields with a few roads cutting across them. Some built, some half built, and quite a few buildings which are just kind of skeletons and unfinished, and there's just a few pockets where a couple of institutions have started to operate. So that is what happened to the project. It's basically kind of in limbo at the moment, and that, of course, left the land pooling farmers in a very bad situation, because having given their land, there was no way they can get it back. It cannot be brought back into cultivation now. The earthwork has happened, and the boundaries have been evased, so there's no way you can put this into reverse. And they are stuck holding these certificates, which are basically worthless, right? So the final part of my book is about how the farmers then responded to this current situation.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:59
So how do they correspond to what what was happening there on that end?

Carol Upadhya 24:04
So what they did, after about a year of being really angry and depressed, they managed to kind of regroup and reorganize themselves. As I said, they were already kind of well organized as a kind of farmers interest group. So that turned into a new political movement, which is called the Save Amaravati movement. And they started doing public demonstrations, agitation, sit ins, protest meetings, trying to, you know, mobilize against what the government was doing, and to raise awareness in the state that so much money had already been invested in this new city, which is now basically going down the drain. Of course, in between covid hit, so in 20 and 21 there wasn't a lot of public activity. But the most important thing that this movement has done has been to file many, many cases in the High Court. Now, as I said, the main core of the land ruling farmers and the movement then are the Kammas. And the Kammas are a very wealthy and well connected community. They have many members living across India as well as abroad, like in the US. So they have a lot of resources. So they were able to raise a lot of money. And by the way, many comers not living in the region started also investing in land there. So there were a lot of people who had an interest in this project being built. And so they managed to raise a lot of money to hire top lawyers and advocates. They got some of the best Supreme Court lawyers from Delhi to come and fight their cases, and they filed numerous petitions at the court to kind of keep the government tied up in knots. The basic argument was that the state government had made a binding contract with the land pooling farmers, against which the farmers gave their land, and they argued that that contract is a contract of the government. It cannot be abrogated just because there's been a change of government, that there's a new party in power. It's a binding legal contract. These court cases went on for quite some time, and they actually then won a very important judgment in the Andhra Pradesh High Court in March 2022 and the court agreed with the farmers. They said that the state government cannot simply abandon the project after over 33,000 acres of land had been given and something like $2 billion had been spent already. And so they gave an order which said that you have to continue the project. But then the state government has been still dragging its feet, finding many excuses not to do anything, filing reverse cases, and so on and so forth. It's been a long, messy five years. Now, almost five years, and now after all this, the state election is again due in early 2024. We'll have to wait and see now what happens in the next election, everything really depends on which party now comes back to power.

Natalie von der Lehr 26:45
What can we learn from this rise and fall, or almost fall, of the Amaravati?

Carol Upadhya 26:50
There are many things we can, you know, learn from this story. One is that I think it really illustrates the contradictions of the current development paradigm that's being formed in India and also many parts of the Global South, which I mentioned at the beginning, which is this kind of very infrastructure centric, urbanization centric model of development. And once you have a model that emphasizes the building of these big mega projects and infrastructure, obviously, these are projects that cannot be built without land. Land becomes the key question. But in all these countries, land is something which millions of people depend on, as small farmers, marginal farmers, peasant farmers, etc, for their livelihoods. That land is being, you know, very quickly transformed into these other kinds of uses. And it's not just a matter of using land to see, taking it from agriculture and then building an urban settlement on it. Land is becoming a financial asset. That's the crucial thing. So for example, in the Amaravati case, you don't need this huge amount of land they've taken, but you could have built a smaller city with just the main buildings that you need for the government to function, right? But the government took at least, you know, 10 times more land than they needed, because that land is then monetized. It's sold off to raise the finance. So basically, land becomes this thing which becomes tradable, but who is benefiting from that trade? It's only the landowners and then the government, right? And so you have all this land is moving out of agriculture and into, basically the real estate market. The land is being assetized, and there's very little that's being done for all the people that are being displaced by this movement, except for those who actually own that property, and everyone else who I mentioned is typically left out. So that's one of the issues that is there across the board. And that Amaravati was being held up as an example of a way to get land for a government project without causing a lot of conflict, but we see now, in the end, that it has caused an even bigger disaster. Rather than farmers protesting and keeping their land, farmers have given their land, and now they are in a middle of a financial disaster. And the government also has wasted a lot of money on a project which may never be finished. And another part of this, I think, for me, has to do with when these mega projects are really being planned from the top down, not just government top down, but then you have things like the Singapore consultants who really have no idea about how Indian society and politics works, who are brought in, and for them, the land, the landscape they have to imagine the city to be built on, is it's just that. It's just empty land. I would very often go to the planning office and ask things like, what will happen to the villages. You're making this very beautiful master plan but in between, there's all these villages - there's no answer. Because it's almost assumed that they're going to somehow naturally disappear as urbanization takes place. But we know from India's urban experience, they don't disappear. They get absorbed into the city, and they might become something like a slum, or they remain as these kind of older areas with small, not very well organized roads, poor infrastructure, etcetera, which is exactly one of the issues of the megacities, that there are these huge agglomerations. You know, I think there needs to be a lot of reflection on this case, and reflection on this idea of very top down urban planning and development planning, which clearly is not going to work. It's not the way in a city, in a country like India, that you can really imagine creating a new city out of something which already has, you know, so many people living and so many people being marginalized by that process. But I also see a glimmer of hope in all of this. I was very struck by the ways in which the local people became politicized by this process. When the project was going well, they were all very happy, and they were just like supporting the government. Once the government changed and they were on the receiving end. They were like the opponents now, the way they became politically conscious and the way they themselves have started questioning this development paradigm. And a lot of debates are going on around this question of what should development look like for us, for India, for my region, for my state. And I think that's a good thing. I mean, there's a lot of awareness now, and I think a lot of implications politically in terms of rethinking, you know, what's happening in India at the current moment.

Natalie von der Lehr 31:25
You were a fellow at SCAS in the spring of 2023. What was your experience of this multi- and interdisciplinary environment at the collinium?

Carol Upadhya 31:33
I mean, it was wonderful, really. It's a very unusual environment where you're kind of thrown together with people from different disciplines and different geographies. And because we have these daily lunches, you know, we all have a chance and really almost compulsory conversations across all these divides. So that was really interesting, just to kind of learn what other people are up to and how they're thinking about all kinds of issues. And I think because that kind of constant discussion was happening, or conversations, for example, when I was there, there was an impromptu discussion group that got organized by one of the colleagues on the question of artificial intelligence, because chatgpt was just coming out, and AI was everyone was talking about AI. So he organized a group, and a few of us interested people used to meet once a week after lunch and basically talk about our experiences. We all were trying out chatgpt and other things, and we were just sharing our thoughts about AI. So that's the kind of thing which, you know, in my normal life I probably wouldn't have gotten involved in, but because I was there, I learned a lot about things quite new to me. Yeah, I wanted to mention that also, because I was in Sweden, I took the opportunity to go up north and visit Kiruna, which is an very old mining city. Kiruna is the largest mine in Sweden, I think or it was. I wanted to visit the place because the cities is in the process of being moved because the city is kind of collapsing, or it's in danger of subsidence because of all the mining activity underneath the ground. So I wanted to go there and find out what their experience was, how the government was negotiating with the people, how the people were maybe, you know, pushing back against the plans, and what kind of democratic process was happening with all that urban planning. So that was a really interesting experience. I met some planners, and I met some of the local people. I saw what was going on with the building. In many ways, the two projects are quite different. I can't do much comparison. For one thing, in Kiruna, there's a whole lot more resources because it's basically being financed by the mining company, and there's no shortage of money. So a lot of thought has gone into the planning, the design, forming committees with the local people to so that everybody's happy and so on. But what I found interesting there is that despite the fact that it seemed like everything is being done very well over there, a lot of people were not happy. And I think they were not happy because basically, when you are forced to move, it invokes a lot of other things. It's not really about your money or your job. It's about your place, your sense of place, your sense of belonging to a place, and your memories and your attachments to place. And now, even though they're moving only maybe 20 miles away, you know, the old house is a very old town, all those memories are kind of going to be just bulldozed. And I think people were very uncomfortable with that kind of change. And similarly, you know, in India, where a village is now getting urbanized, it was becoming part or getting demolished because of a larger project, these are places that have been settled and occupied for hundreds, if not a 1000 years. So people have very deep roots in these places. It's not possible to simply uproot people and places and create something new, even if it looks very nicely planned, very efficient, very environment friendly. It has all that stuff which we want. But does it have, like one could say, a soul? What is the spirit of that place now? So I think those are the kind of issues that I started thinking about when I did that visit to Kiruna.

Natalie von der Lehr 35:05
Thank you very much for joining me here on SCAS Talks and our listeners, of course.

Carol Upadhya 35:10
Thank you.

Natalie von der Lehr 35:13
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. This was the first episode on our theme "Cities as Mega-Projects". And I have talked to Carol Upadhya, visiting professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India, and fellow at SCAS during the spring of 2023. We have talked about the rise and fall of the megacity Amaravati in India. SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the collegium. We're sure that there's something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic, or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we're very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on poddbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Carol Upadhya once again for talking to me, and thanks to you, of course, for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai