ancient cities

army. Colonial cities appear in the Americas
around AD 1200, when the Aztecs established the
city of Tenochtitlán (present-day Mexico City). By
the fifteenth century, owing mainly to the military
prowess of the Aztecs, Tenochtitlán served as the
center of the Aztec alliance—a confederation of
towns from which it received tribute. On the eve of
the Spanish conquest, the city was so densely
populated (approximately 9 million persons) that
the Aztec ruler tried to pressure the “colonies” to
increase their tributes to Tenochtitlán, which in
turn caused several rebellions. The fourteenth century
also saw the rise of the Inca Empire, with its
capital at Cuzco (in modern-day Peru). This empire
was renowned for its large public works, such as
road networks, irrigation systems, and so on. Incan
towns such as Chan-Chan and Huanuco Pampa
were organized around large plazas from where the
Inca himself presided over state ceremonies.
The sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, or
the early modern period, was marked by the rise of
European powers such as Spain, Portugal, and the
Netherlands. The Iberian colonization of the
Americas has been understood through the motivation
of the colonizers to convert the indigenous
population in a religious and cultural sense in an
attempt to wipe out existing native cultures. Thus
the North American cities of San Francisco and
San Diego grew around the religious institution of
a Catholic mission that provided the first change
from a largely agrarian economy to an urban one.
The Dutch colonial city of Zeelandia off the southwest
coast of China, established as a trading port
in 1624, proved to be one of the most profitable
and strategic ports for the Dutch East India
Company.
Modern imperialism of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries was marked by the rise of
empires such as France, Britain, and Italy. The rise
of modern industrial capitalism was the primary
catalyst for this phase of colonialism, and the success
of the Industrial Revolution in Europe was
entrenched in the surplus extraction of resources
from the peripheries of North Africa, South Asia,
and Southeast Asia. During this period colonial
administrators and planners used the colonized
peripheries for various sociospatial experiments.
Colonial urban planners saw the colonies as a
tabula rasa (blank slate) onto which they were free
to impose their utopian urban ideals—visions that
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would have been impossible to implement in the
metropoles of Paris or London. Thus, the professionalization
of urban planning in Europe should be
viewed as deeply rooted in the colonial experience.
Theoretical Frameworks
Contemporary understanding of the colonial city
owes much to Edward Said’s path-breaking book
Orientalism, which argued that colonialism was
based on the epistemological and ontological production
of difference between the colonizer and
the colonized. Thus, a key element of the process
of colonialism was the representation of the native
population as powerless, organizationally backward,
traditionally rooted (and therefore stagnant),
and culturally inferior to the dominant
population. Inspired by Said’s argument, urban
historians and theorists began to look upon colonial
cities as the laboratories where this difference
was produced and the primary apparatus through
which control and domination over the colonized
was ensured. These scholars theorized the colonial
city through various approaches.
The paradigm of modernization (Rostow) claims
that colonial cities were divided into two types of
spaces: modern (representative of the dominant
population of colonizers) and a preindustrial or
traditional city (representative of the native subject
population). The space of the modern city is
arranged around an industrialized economy and
therefore has components such as ports, post
offices, and commercial centers, whereas the native
space continues to be organized around traditional
bazaars based on a workshop system of production.
Based on a linear notion of urban development,
this paradigm proposes the colonial city as
gradually shedding its traditional modes of production
and growing into a Western-style capitalist
economy.
The colonial city has also been understood as
contact between distinct cultures (King) and the
physical form that arose out of the imposition of a
nonindigenous cultural system on the colonized
landscape. This framework of understanding the
colonial city assumes that the cultures of the colonizer
and colonized were mutually exclusive, and
the colonial city is predominantly the result of the
contact between these two distinct cultures. In
other words, this theoretical framework argues