The Digital Shaping of a City: A Biography of ‘Cyberabad’ in Three Acts

The growth of the city of Hyderabad–India’s “second electronic city”—over the past three decades has paralleled the vision and the aspirational policies of a newly liberalised India, creating both opportunities and disruptions in the lives of its inhabitants. The last three decades have seen the city steadily expand both in terms of its geographical borders and a large migrant population in pursuit of work in the city that has now been dubbed “Cyberabad”. This steady transformation has seen the city’s loci of power shift as traditional economic and cultural centers have either been reconfigured or have made way for new quotidian infrastructures that mark the environs of “Hi-Tech City” or the new IT corridor. For the city’s inhabitants, the digital has shaped everyday life not only because of the growing dependence on networked devices, but also through the infrastructures of daily living–urban transport, white-, blue- and no-collar jobs, security, roads, and waste management. This chapter attempts to make sense of these on-going transformations by framing them as not only geographical or urban developments but as sites that reconfigure and shape the way a city’s population routinely works, learns, lives, performs acts of leisure, and of course relates and communicates. Underlying these transformations are policy decisions and governance approaches that emphasise the digital as urban infrastructure. Using a multi-sited ethnography of four historically and socio-economically distinct parts of Hyderabad, this chapter traces the manner in which these sites have transformed to accommodate and be accommodated by the city’s recreation as a hub of the new (digital) economy.