ABSTRACT

This chapter finds planning in the context of Southeast Asia's colonial condition, which planning literature has both confronted and helped to constitute. It teases out concepts and issues that are important to the planning history of the region. The chapter then indicates strategies of colonial rule and their influences on the architecture, urban design, and planning in the region. It discusses how assumptions about race, place, and culture defined planning and set up the boundary of modernization in the colony. The chapter then problematizes the diffusionist approach of planning history for its assumption of power and its neglect of issues of reception and agency of the colonized. It addresses the relatively important, but often neglected, presence of Japanese occupation in the region. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the works that have contributed to the revision of planning historiography.