ABSTRACT
Anthony King wrote over 20 years ago that ‘The distinctive social characteristic of the colonial city … is the fact of race’ (King 1990: 34). The spatial separation of ‘races’, reinforcing cultural differences and unequal power relations, was strongly developed in the cities created by European colonial expansion, as conscious acts of law and policy. The legacy of colonialism is now etched on the landscape and in the societies of many, if not most, of the ‘cities of the global south’, and it still distinguishes them from those of the ‘global north’, even though they have grown in extent and population far beyond their colonial origins, and the former ‘colonial masters’ have largely departed. Well-researched studies of individual cities exist (e.g. Bigon 2009 on Lagos and Dakar; Legg 2007 on Delhi; Mutale 2004 on Kitwe; Oldenburg 1984 on Lucknow), but to construct a universal account of the city of the south as a colonial manifestation is a challenging task, given its geographical, temporal, cultural, trans-national and trans-disciplinary dimensions.
