ABSTRACT
Interest in the issue of colonial urban space has developed over the past three or four decades. This theme was addressed by many scholars such as Anthony King, who in refl ecting on Delhi proposed three variables concerning colonial urban development: culture, technology and power structure of colonialism.1 Other scholars have addressed colonial and post-colonial urban development through the analyses of different case studies in the world. While Stephan Leggbuilds on Michel Foucault’s analyses of discourse to analyse the colonial case of Delhi, he stresses on colonial governmentalities within the sovereign power, biopolitical improvement and the function of Delhi as a national and international node.2 In his study in urban history Spiro Kostofhas focused on the urban form with all the historical processes and meanings they represent and has provided important analyses on cultural contexts behind the creation of colonial cities.3 Zeynep Celik adopted a historical perspective of urban form and urban processes to identify their impact on culture and identity.4 Mohamed Osmanigives an overview of various colonial cities from a sociological approach.5 Brenda Yeoh has discussed how Singapore as a space of control and resistance was made visible and governable through negotiation of power between municipal authorities and the Asian communities, in shaping physical, disciplinary and biopolitical spatial formations.6 Legg, Kostof, Celik, Osmani and Yeoh provide different examples of various approaches to analyze colonial cases. However, this book attempts to provide a means to tie the analyses with the other phases of colonialism in one coherent and continued analysis. Bill Ashcroftcriticizes the common strategy of the post-colonial and relates this to the misconception between culture and identity.7 He suggests a post-colonial policy of Interpolation, as a process of insertion, interruption, interjection, as an initial movement in the process of postcolonial transformation. Jyoti Hosagraharinvestigates the case of colonial and post-colonial Delhi and acknowledges the discourses of modernity showing the formal contradictions and the absence of coherence in the indigenous modernities presented in urban spaces.8 Jane Jacobsinvestigates the space of the city and analyses post-colonialism and its relation with colonialism as well as the relation between global and local.9 She provides a productive encounter between new theorizations of imperialism and post-colonialism, and illustrates how grand ideas of empire may become unstable technologies of power. Nihal Pereraillustrates the
hybridity and mimicry in Sri Lanka while investigating the extent of ‘indigenization’ in the post-colonial phase, a term he interprets as a form of social and spatial assimilation and resistance.10 Other authors who analysed both theoretical and specifi c cases on colonial urban development in various phases include Nezzar Al Sayyad,11 Carole Rakodi,12 and Abidin Kusno.13 While the above, and numerous other authors,14 have provided a rich and diverse array of analysis and possibilities of various phases of colonialism, this book attempts to combine a sustained and systematic analysis of colonialism and post-colonialism with a discussion of the dynamics of changes and transformations to current colonial cases by using the medium of space.
