Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Building a New Middle Class: Urban Change and the Cosmopolitan Consumer in Kolkata and Delhi, India

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research, by graduate student Llerena Searle under the supervision of Dr. Asif Agha, investigates the effects of globalization and new consumer choices on middle class identity in India. She takes as her focus the recent expansion of middle class housing in urban areas. Since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s, the urban real estate sector, now a $12 billion dollar industry, has become dominated by global building types (malls, high-rises, and office parks). This research will test the hypothesis that real estate choices and media about buildings recruit buyers not only to real estate but also to the new consuming middle class lifestyles. She asks how real estate developers appeal to images of personhood and lifestyle as they design and advertise buildings and how residents invest in, resist, and appropriate such images of personhood, may contribute to new consumerist modes of living. In both Gurgaon (a suburb of Delhi) and Kolkata, the researcher will conduct participant observation at a developer's office, with families buying apartments, and in a completed residential complex; interview developers, architects, planners, and real estate consultants; and analyze building-related media (such as advertisements, brochures, and floor-plans). This research unites the study of urbanization with that of social change to illuminate the relationship between new consumerist social identities and new global buildings in India. By demonstrating how global ways of building and ways of living are being taken up in India, this study serves as a good case study of how global forms more generally are communicated, appropriated, and transformed. It will also contribute to the training of two Indian graduate student field assistants and the student-researcher.