Storing and Delivering Difference: Urban Peripheral Warehousing in Bangalore

Abstract

A rapidly expanding built environment of warehouses designed to cater to the needs of
instant delivery is increasingly situated at the urban periphery of India's mega-cities. India’s
warehouse sector attracted investments of Rs. 265 billion between 2017-22. Warehouse
developer lobbies see this as a critical moment for the modernization of the sector as new central
government policies promise to deliver development as commodity circulation. Despite the
warehousing sectors’ allusions to modernity and development, urban peripheral warehousing, I
argue, reinforces historic caste-based patterns of land inequality while producing new vectors of
class inequity. Since low rentals make buying land for warehousing unfeasible for developers,
much urban peripheral warehousing is produced by local, caste-dominant landholders who
convert their ancestral agricultural land holdings into rent-producing assets. How does social
difference, particularly caste, allow these obtrusive box-like structures and the seemingly inert
land parcels on which they lie to become embedded in value-producing networks of rent and
accumulation? Equally, what do these warehouses tell us about the form and operation of social
difference in the present urban conjuncture? I study these dynamics along an industrial corridor
in Bangalore housing nearly 40% of the city’s warehousing supply. The city accounted for 4
million of the nation’s 47 million, square feet of new warehousing space in 2022. My arguments
draw from semi-structured interviews with warehouse landowners, tenant firms, warehouse
procurement experts, and government officials, along with observation of warehousing brokers.