ABSTRACT
Planning histories of cities of the Global South have moved beyond planning and history into different social science disciplines—geography, sociology and architecture, as well as area studies. Planning history provides an opportunity to explore Foucauldian ideas of governmentality, how techniques of power and the security apparatus reshape the rules whereby individuals and populations conduct their lives, with the aim of producing self-regulating, self-improving subjects. Scholarship on the colonial city has combined with planning history, exploring it as a domain of intention for the display of status and power, and for changing society and repatterning daily life. The complex phenomenon of the colonial city remains important, as scholarship continues to develop on the planning history of the Global South. The built heritage and cultural legacy of former colonial empires thus remains relevant to the negotiation of postcolonial identities, as well as continuing to influence contemporary urban form and practice in the Global South.
