ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that the postcolonial perspective offers a sharp critique of Western/colonial epistemologies by revealing the power relations characterizing the geographical hierarchies in urban studies. Postcolonial scholarship has interrogated the ways in which and the places from which knowledge about the urban is produced, challenging the dominance of Northern urban theorizing. The chapter describes the necessity for a more systematic approach to postcolonial/decolonial critical perspectives in the study of urbanization as a global phenomenon. The Indian experience is one of the most important to the postcolonial critique. The core of the postcolonial approach relies on the conviction that colonialism has been crucial for the shaping and global diffusion of a form of knowledge posited as universal and neutral. One of the important results of the planetary urbanization approach is to challenge successfully a very common geographical division such as that of the Global North and Global South.
