ancient cities

166 Colonial City
dominated were clear, and are often characterized
by the physical segregation of their ethnic, social,
religious, and cultural constituencies. The terms
periphery (referring to the territory that is colonized)
and metropole (referring to the imperial
center of power) indicate the geographically separate
but ideologically related components of colonial
urbanism.
Due to the asymmetry of power between the
colonized and the colonizers, the colonial project
may be defined as a power struggle oscillating
between dominance and dependence, and often the
morphological layout of the cities reflected this
equation. For example, many colonial cities followed
a dual-city model with sharp segregation
between the urban realms of the colonizer and the
colonized. French colonial cities of Morocco such
as Fez, Rabat, and Casablanca were marked by the
distinction between a European town and “traditional”
or native city.
Colonial cities often served as the very apparatus
through which domination was maintained
over this subject population. Motivated by religious,
cultural, or economic ideologies, colonial
cities functioned as the environments through
which religious or cultural conversion and economic
exploitation occurred. For example, colonial
cities such as Bombay, Singapore, Kingston,
and Rio de Janeiro grew around the ports that
serviced the surplus extraction of resources and
labor from the colonies to the metropole.
Colonial cities often displayed social diversity,
with various racial, cultural, and religious groups
organized into a rigid stratification system. This
social hierarchy was composed of a ruling elite
(colonial settlers), the colonized indigenous population,
and an intervening group intermediate in
status and power. For example, in Calcutta, British
colonists deliberately cultivated a segment of the
indigenous elite, who served as intermediaries
between the colonizers and the colonized. These
elites often lived in grand spaces that were comparable
to those of the dominant population and
exercised considerable control over their urban
environment.
History and Geography
The task of identifying the earliest colonial city is
complicated by the limits of archaeology. Therefore,
while we know that the sea-based Minoan empire
(3000–2200 BC) with its capital at Knossos colonized
large tracts of Egypt and Mesopotamia, little
evidence regarding the colonies themselves remains
from which to glean their colonial nature.
Archaeology, however, has provided some evidence
regarding the urbanizing tendencies of the
ancient and classical empires such as Egypt and
Greece. For example, between 1500 and 1100 BC,
the Egyptian Empire established a vast network
of colonial cities in the Nubian Nile Valley. The
design of these colonial towns was fairly uniform,
with a square or rectangular layout enclosed
with thick mud-brick walls. Excavations at New
Kingdom towns such as Amara West and Sesebi
have shown that streets, at least initially, were laid
out along the lines of a grid. At the center of each
town was a large stone temple, surrounded by
storerooms for goods and domestic residences.
The Grecian Empire emerged in the late fifth century
as an alliance between 300 tribute-paying
cities along the Aegean coast. Miletus (in modern
Turkey) stands out as the most famous of these
and followed Hippodamus’s plan for an “ideal”
city, where the citizenry would be divided into
three classes: artisans, farmers, and soldiers. Urban
land would be demarcated as sacred, public, or
private and at the center of the city were replicas
of the agora (public commons) and the stoa (marketplace)
of Athens.
In the postclassical era the Roman Empire provided
paradigmatic colonial cities whose grid form
evoked the formal organization of the metropole.
Following the Roman conquest of Damascus (first
century BC) the city was reorganized around an
east–west axis (decamanus) and a north–south axis
(castrum). Colonnaded streets and a forum further
consolidated it as a city of the Roman Empire.
Colonial cities also emerged from the Islamic
Empire in various parts of North Africa, the
Middle East, and the Fertile Crescent. Starting in
the late seventh century, Arab invaders to the Nile
valley set up garrison towns for their troops. These
temporary military camps became the urban kernels
around which mosques, commercial markets,
and residential quarters grew, eventually turning
into a permanent city. Early towns settled by the
Arab invaders such as Kufah were arranged around
a system of gridded streets that demarcated specific
areas for the various tribes that served the colonial