ancient cities

The specific social, cultural, and economic functions
of the Anglo-Indian bungalow imported to the
British African colonies, and their subsequent appropriation
by postcolonial elites, arguably distinguished
it from existing African “house and veranda”
types. However, some of these functions, like the use
of verandas as a social space and as a means to control
interior building temperatures, were common to
both West African and Anglo-Indian examples.
Other colonial authorities in Africa also used
the bungalow. From the 1820s, the Swiss-German
Basel Missionary Society used a similar building
type in the Gold Coast as part of a comprehensive
proselytization policy. In 1895 German colonial
administrators identified the Anglo-Indian bungalow
as the building type best suited for European
use in East Africa.
Theories of the development of the bungalow in
colonial contexts share a common disregard for
the continued development of the “original” bungalow
form, arguing that the postcolonial elite’s
use of the building type owes more to European
influence than anything else. Future work on the
topic might investigate the coexistence of “original”
and “imposed” forms in order to achieve a more
holistic understanding.
Itohan Osayimwese
See also Colonial City; Suburbanization; Veranda
Further Readings
Chattopadhyay, Swati. 2000. “‘Blurring Boundaries: The
Limits of White Town in Colonial Calcutta.” Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians
59(2):154–79.
———. 2002. “Goods, Chattels & Sundry Items:
Constructing 19th-century Anglo-Indian Domestic
Life.” Journal of Material Culture 7(3):243–71.
Farrar, Tarikhu. 1996. Building Technology and
Settlement Planning in a West African Civilization:
Precolonial Akan Cities and Towns. Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press.
Fishman, Robert. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and
Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books.
Glover, Williman J. 2004. “‘An Absence of Old England’:
The Anxious English Bungalow.” Home Cultures
1(1):61–81.
King, Anthony. 1984. The Bungalow: The Production of
a Global Culture. London: Routledge.
Bunkers
93
Lancaster, Clay. 1985. The American Bungalow,
1880–1930. New York: Abbeville Press.
Osayimwese, Itohan. 2008. “Colonialism at the Center:
German Colonial Architecture and the Design Reform
Movement.” PhD Dissertation, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Bu n k e r S
There is an increasing interest, in urban studies, sociology,
and archaeology, in military bunkers. The
concept informed Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology
(1994), for instance, and has been significant for the
Brutalist tradition of European architects, including
Le Corbusier. European cultural sociology has also
expanded its themes and theorizing within particular
militarized landscapes and bunkered urban locations,
as has contemporary British archaeology.
Military bunkers, then, are a key component of
the urban condition, if not always consciously
acknowledged as such. Nevertheless, the concept
has been reframed regarding the increasingly synchronized
themes of postmodernity, war, and the
emerging interests of the new subject of combat
archaeology. The well-known characteristics of
postmodern war—the worldwide scope of militarism,
information warfare, unmanned aerial vehicles,
compulsory or intentional urban mobility and
confinement, nomadic terrorists, unstable patterns
of military deployment, and so on—have fundamentally
changed the everyday experience and symbolic
associations of military bunkers. Consequently,
the supposed certainties of modern urban identity,
confidently situated beyond the particularities of
military bunkers, which typically house an underground
shelter of reinforced concrete with an
incline and embrasures for artillery above ground,
are increasingly disturbed and relocated. A useful
approach is to conceive of military bunkers as military
spaces, for military spaces such as military
bunkers are fields of military action. Military bunkers,
accordingly, are military spaces to which the
potentiality for military action has been assigned.
Hence, military bunkers establish a sense of militarized
and civilianized urban identities through various
communicative and physically destructive
relationships, such as what is meant by the “home
front” or where the home front is located.