ABSTRACT
Ethno-territorial conflicts loom large, but so do the politics of development and confessionalism. In these multiple ways, urban geopolitics might be interpreted as a broad synonym for urban political geography, anticipated in prior work on cities and conflict, the geography of urban politics and the wider politics of urban planning. The European overseas empires were tied to distinctive modes of the production of city spaces, commerce and security, so that, for example, bunds and cantonments became emblematic features of British imperial urbanism, along with notions of race and colonial space. Likewise, East European and Soviet communism yielded relatively distinctive urban spaces: "determined in the complex interplay between political dictate, expert knowledge and bureaucratic norms and practices". Dystopian visions, fortified with gated communities, compounds, fear, surveillance and barricades, are rightly centre-stage in many narrations of urban geopolitics.
