ABSTRACT
This chapter examines cities as the site of the 'other', particularly discussing colonial cities, which were seen as challenging to the natural order, as well as being inhabited by individuals who transgressed in various ways. As Louis Wirth famously claimed, 'The city has thus historically been the melting-pot of races, peoples, and cultures, and a most favourable breeding-ground of new biological and cultural hybrids'. Colonial cities were often seen, from the vantage point of Europe, as particularly disordered. Swati Chattopadhyay has argued that 'the unfamiliarity of the colonial city could on occasion even pass as novelty. Reputation defence strategies are indicative not of disorder but in fact of a different order from that in Europe, resulting from different conditions and priorities. The colonial city offered both layered and mediated encounters. The tension remained between the colonial cities representing the national identity of the metropole, versus their identity as the site of the exotic.
