Paper short abstract:

Mangalore’s intensive building activity is explored through ethnographic work with housing brokers and real estate developers (as crucial agents of access and imagination), analysing the role these two groups of intermediaries play in opening and closing the structures of possibility in the city.

Paper long abstract:

In the past two decades Mangalore has gone from being a city that dwelt almost exclusively below the tree line to a city awash with high-rise buildings. This intensive increase in building activity is related to a number of processes including: in-migration for work and study; migrants' remuneration from the Gulf; increased desire for nuclear family living (especially amongst returnee migrants); capital's need for a spatial fix; real estate's role in washing 'black money'; and a shift towards conceptualising property as an investment. This, in turn, has influenced, and is influenced by, changing imaginations of what constitutes a 'modern' house in a 'developed' city and what sort of people make desirable owners/tenants. Based primarily on ethnographic work with housing brokers and private sector real estate developers (as crucial agents of access and imagination), the paper explores the role these two groups of intermediaries play in opening and closing the structures of possibility in the city in relation to housing and how this mediation intersects with class, caste, community, age and gender. Filling a gap in research on both small cities and the workings of the real estate sector in India, the paper seeks to explore how macro processes are realised in the everyday workings of the urban housing market. More specifically, these interweaving processes are explored through three temporal frames: the launch event of a new building, the life story of two housing agents and their everyday working lives.