Key points
- Fanon described the colonial city cut in two; today the line is drawn by land prices, infrastructure and the wall.
- Graham and Marvin: unbundled networks produce premium spaces connected to the world and bypassed zones without services.
- Caldeira and Holston: political rights expanded while civil rights remained denied to the poor; the law legitimises inequality.
Urban fragmentation in postcolonial cities is the division of space into enclaves connected to global networks and peripheries disconnected from basic services, an inheritance of the colonial city that independence did not undo and that globalisation has deepened. Frantz Fanon described in 1961 the colonial city as a world cut in two, the settler's city, lit and paved, and the colonised's city, hungry and crowded, separated by barracks and police stations; half a century later, in São Paulo, Johannesburg, Lagos or Mumbai, the line is no longer drawn by the army but by land prices, infrastructure and the wall, and the question is why the cities that freed themselves from colonialism remain fragmented.
Unbundled infrastructure: Graham, Marvin and splintering urbanism
The mechanism has two layers. The first is infrastructure: Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin showed in Splintering Urbanism (2001) that water, electricity, telecommunications and transport networks, which in the modern city promised to serve everyone alike, have been unbundled and privatised, producing premium networked spaces, office towers, gated developments, airports and toll highways connected to each other and to the world, alongside bypassed zones the networks cross without stopping. Matthew Gandy documented in Lagos how the collapse of public infrastructure coexisted with generators, wells and private guards for those who could pay: the city does not lack services, it distributes them by income.
Caldeira and Holston: disjunctive democracy and differentiated citizenship
The second layer is citizenship, analysed by Teresa Caldeira and James Holston in Brazil. In their joint 1999 article on democracy and violence, and later in City of Walls and Insurgent Citizenship, they described a disjunctive democracy in which political rights expanded while civil rights, bodily integrity, justice, protection from the police, remained denied to the poor; the elites responded with fortified enclaves and the peripheries with self-building and a differentiated citizenship that grants each person rights according to what they own. Holston notes that this inequality is legitimised by the law itself, by property and planning rules inherited from the colonial order that make the city most people build illegal.
Johannesburg: a divided city democracy did not unite
Johannesburg shows the persistence. Apartheid designed a city of townships far from the white centres, and since 1994 democracy has lifted the legal walls but not the spatial ones: Sandton became Africa's financial node with shopping centres and gated developments while Alexandra, a few kilometres away, remained overcrowded with intermittent services, and Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw and Susan Parnell described in 2002 the difficulty of uniting a divided city when the market replaces the state as the agent of segregation. Violence does the rest: where the state does not guarantee safety, fear justifies new walls and fragmentation feeds itself.
Resistance, the counterargument and what it would take to unite the city
Resistance is part of the picture. Holston showed that São Paulo's peripheries produced an insurgent citizenship that claimed rights from self-building; the movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, born in Durban in 2005, defends settlement residents against evictions; São Paulo's MTST occupies vacant land to demand housing, and Ananya Roy and Jennifer Robinson have proposed reading those practices not as lack but as ways of producing city. The counterargument is that fragmentation is not only postcolonial, it exists in Los Angeles or Paris, and that attributing it to colonialism can exempt today's governments from responsibility; the answer is that the colonial inheritance does not explain everything but fixes the starting point, and that later policies chose to deepen it rather than correct it.
The lesson is that the postcolonial city is not fragmented by accident but by successive layers of decisions, colonial, state and market, that distribute infrastructure, rights and safety by income. Uniting it takes more than tearing down walls: public networks that serve everyone, civil citizenship guaranteed for the poor and recognition of the self-built city as a legitimate part of the city. Where that does not happen, the line Fanon described still stands, under another name.
Frequently asked questions
Why do postcolonial cities remain fragmented?
Because the colonial division Fanon described was inherited and deepened by successive layers of decisions: privatised infrastructures that serve enclaves and bypass peripheries, property rules that make the self-built city illegal, civil citizenship denied to the poor and a fear that justifies new walls.
What is Caldeira and Holston's disjunctive democracy?
A democracy in which political rights, the vote, expanded while civil rights, bodily integrity, justice and protection from the police, remained denied to the poor; elites responded by withdrawing into fortified enclaves and the peripheries with self-building and an insurgent citizenship.
