Colonialism
The colonial city is one a power built or reorganised to administer someone else's territory: a grid laid over the earlier city, a European quarter separated from the native one, a port facing the metropole. Its forms and divisions outlive independence, and postcolonial urbanism studies how to dismantle them or how they reproduce.
The Laws of the Indies of 1573 fixed the grid of hundreds of American cities; the segregation of the African or Asian colonial city became that of apartheid and of the periphery. Jennifer Robinson asked that all cities be studied as ordinary rather than as late copies of London or New York.
Videos on this term (27)
- Infrastructure
Brian Berry: Cities as an Invisible System of Connections
Brian J. L. Berry showed that cities form systems ranked by flows of goods, people and information: central places,…
Brian Berry 3 min read - Public space
Why Cities Should Not Be Identical Models: Jennifer Robinson
Jennifer Robinson argues in Ordinary Cities that every city can produce theory and that judging them by the…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read - Urban economy
AbdouMaliq Simone: People as the Infrastructure of the City
AbdouMaliq Simone shows that informal networks sustain urban life in the Global South: people as infrastructure,…
AbdouMaliq Simone 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Who Experiments in Our Cities? Pilots and Risk in the Global South
Experimental urbanism tests the cities of the future in the Global South, from Eko Atlantic to India's smart cities…
3 min read - Public space
Insurgent Citizenship: James Holston and the Peripheries of São Paulo
James Holston's insurgent citizenship explains how the residents who self-built São Paulo's peripheries won rights…
James Holston 3 min read - Climate change
David Simon and Resilient Cities in the Global South
David Simon studies how Global South cities adapt to climate change with informality and few resources.
David Simon 3 min read - Urban economy
Nik Theodore: Neoliberal Urbanism, Informal Work and Migrants
Nik Theodore explains how neoliberal urbanism produces precarity, what his studies of day labourers and migrants in…
Nik Theodore 2 min read - Urban economy
Tania Murray Li: Development, Exclusion and the Will to Improve
Tania Murray Li explains why development programmes produce exclusion by rendering political problems technical.
Tania Murray Li 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
African Cities by Garth Myers: Reassessing African Cities
African Cities (2011) by Garth Myers proposes reading African cities on their own terms: postcolonial, informal,…
Garth Myers 2 min read - Public space
Thirdspaces: Soja and Bhabha's Third Space in the City
Thirdspaces are the hybrid places where the dichotomies of public and private, centre and periphery break down.…
Edward Soja 3 min read - Urban economy
Critical Urban Studies by Davies and Imbroscio: Social Justice
Critical Urban Studies (2010), edited by Jonathan Davies and David Imbroscio, revisits urban studies from social…
2 min read - Urban history
Cairo According to Nezar AlSayyad: Histories of a Superimposed City
Cairo: Histories of a City by Nezar AlSayyad explains Cairo as superimposed cities, from Fustat and the Fatimids to…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Brenda Yeoh: Migration and Urbanization in Asian Cities
Brenda Yeoh explains how Singapore and other Asian cities grow with migrant workers denied belonging.
Brenda Yeoh 2 min read - Urban history
Decolonising Urban Heritage: Statues, Streets and Memory
Decolonising urban heritage reviews which colonial monuments and names occupy public space. What Sharon Zukin and…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Peripheral Global Cities: Subordinate Integration and Exclusion
How the cities of the Global South are inserted into the world economy in a subordinate way: Grant and Nijman's…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Indigenous Peoples in the City: Rights and Recognition
Indigenous peoples' rights in the city clash with urban expansion and planning. What Clara Irazábal and Raquel…
3 min read - Public space
Insurgent Citizenship: James Holston and the City from Below
James Holston's insurgent citizenship explains how São Paulo's peripheries won rights by building their…
James Holston 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Production of Space in the Global South: Robinson and Pieterse
The production of space in the Global South needs its own categories. What Jennifer Robinson (Ordinary Cities). The…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Forced Displacement in the Global South: A Growing Urban Crisis
Forced displacement in Global South cities grows through development, violence and climate. What Mike Davis and…
3 min read - Urban economy
Richard Florida's The New Urban Crisis: Inequality in Cities
The New Urban Crisis (2017) by Richard Florida explains why the most prosperous cities push out the people who…
Richard Florida 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Urbanization in the Global South: Simone, Pieterse and Roy Explained
Global South urbanization concentrates the world's urban growth without formal jobs or state capacity. What…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Postcolonial Urban Fragmentation: Inequality and Resistance
Why postcolonial cities remain divided: Fanon's city, Graham and Marvin's splintering infrastructure, Caldeira and…
3 min read - Urban economy
Feminization of Urban Poverty: Causes and Policy Responses
The feminization of urban poverty explains why women bear more of the burden of poverty in cities.
2 min read - Urban psychology
Urban Violence and Insecurity: Caldeira, Wacquant and Davis
Urban violence and fear reorganise the city into gated enclaves and abandoned peripheries. What Teresa Caldeira,…
2 min read - Public space
Decolonising Urban Space: What It Means and How It Is Done
Decolonising urban space dismantles the hierarchies colonisation left in cities. What Ananya Roy and Jennifer…
3 min read - Urban economy
Informal Economy and Informal Settlements in the Global South
Two billion people work in the informal economy and a billion live in informal settlements. What AbdouMaliq Simone…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Jennifer Robinson and Ordinary Cities: Urban Theory from the South
Ordinary Cities (2006) by Jennifer Robinson holds that all cities are ordinary and sources of theory. Her critique…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read
