When Is the Next City Happening?

Abstract This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.