ABSTRACT
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed dramatic cultural upheaval in many parts of the world. The period was significant for Western Europe’s colonization of Asia and Africa. Europe’s modernity was an outcome of both. Appropriating history and historiography, Europe constructed itself as the prototypical ‘modern’ subject. To be ‘modern’ was the prerogative of European rulers who claimed the right to define its meaning and assert its forms. The definition was based on difference: to be ‘modern’ was to be ‘not traditional.’ In this binary scheme of being ‘modern’ and ‘traditional,’ those that were not entirely one or the other were declared to be ‘modernizing’ towards a predetermined end. For those who regard the forms of Europe’s modernity to be the only ones that are valid, all others were transitory, incomplete, inadequate, or ‘traditional.’ This fundamental opposition has been the premise of both scholarship and professional intervention in city planning and architecture. Questioning the binarism, this book relocates discussions of modernity to ‘other’ geographies outside its conventional locus of Western Europe and North America. Taking the position that the idea of ‘modern’ is a normative attribute culturally constructed in the extreme inequities of colonialism, and informed by the perspective that building, space, and society are (re)constitutively connected, I set out in this book to understand the anxieties of displacement and the fragmentation of experience in one city’s engagement with extraordinary cultural change.
