ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters my focus has principally been on the present and recent past and, in this second section of the book, on exploring how processes of postcolonialism and globalization, or postcolonial globalization, can be identified in spatial and architectural terms. Recent historical studies using the globalization paradigm mentioned in Chapter 2 (Held et al., 1999; Hopkins 2002) have done much to remedy the earlier ahistorical theorizations which dominated discussion of the topic in the 1990s. They have also foregrounded the importance of imperialism, or rather imperialisms, as perhaps the principal form which globalization took between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries (Hopkins 2002). While much of the earlier treatment of the subject has concentrated particularly on an economic interpretation of imperialism, the ‘cultural turn’ marked by the development of postcolonial studies has unearthed a vast and, in many cases, still unexplored agenda, particularly in relation to architecture and urban studies.
