ancient cities

168 Colonial City
that the form of the colonial city was a direct result
of the culture of colonial domination.
A political economy approach (Wallerstein) situates
the colonial city within larger economic systems
of production and consumption where the
urbanization of the third world periphery was
based on an unequal exchange of goods and labor
with the first world core, and colonial cities were
deliberately created to facilitate European capitalist
expansion. This theoretical framework was
expanded upon by dependency theorists (Frank)
who further argued that the core–periphery model
of development also replicated itself within the
third world, where, once established, colonial cities
then developed a dominant relation with the agricultural
hinterland, which in turn led to uneven
development within the colonies themselves. As it
drew labor, raw materials, and agricultural
resources from the hinterland, the development of
the colonial city went hand in hand with the underdevelopment
of the city (through slums, squatters,
and tenements) as well as of the rural countryside.
In recent years, urban historians and theorists
have looked more closely at colonial cities as the site
of indigenous agency (Yeoh), suggesting that the
colonized population was more than simply passive
recipients of the visions and schemes of the
colonizers, but rather exercised agency in the construction
of colonial cities through everyday use and
negotiations with the dominant population. The
end result of the colonial city was thus a compromised
version of the ideal schemes as imagined by
the colonizer and incorporated a whole host of elements
that catered to the indigenous population.
Form and Function
The primary motivations of the colonial project
often manifested themselves in the physical formal
arrangements of the colonial city. The following
paragraphs list some examples of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century colonial urbanism.
Racial segregation was a primary preoccupation
of colonial planners and administrators. Cities
such as Fez (Morocco) and Algiers (Algeria) were
designed with distinct quarters for the indigenous
population and European colonizers. The two sections
of these dual cities were separated by a cordon
sanitaire—an open green zone—that served as
a hygienic as well as symbolic division between the
racially distinct areas. Motivated by the medical
profession’s racial explanation of epidemics and
contagious disease, European colonizers justified
the cordon sanitaire as vital to the protection of
their own health and lives. Colonial racial anxieties
were thus manifested as urban apartheid.
Colonial cities were also used as the symbolic
devices through which imperial power was represented
and displayed. In 1911, when Delhi
was proclaimed as the capital of the British
Empire in India, a new city was built to house
the administrative center of the empire. New
Delhi was built adjacent to Shahjahanabad—a
city that had been the seat of the Mughal Empire
for over 200 years. In building New Delhi,
British administrators sought, through visual
elements and architectural styles, to represent
the British Empire as the rightful successors to
the Mughal Empire that they had recently abrogated.
Similarly Addis Ababa (in modern-day
Ethiopia) became a capital of the Italian empire
in 1936. The new capital city, as envisioned by
Benito Mussolini, would achieve two interrelated
goals: (1) It would establish strict segregation
between Black natives and White colonizers,
and (2) it would represent the Italian empire as
comparable in strength and domination to its
French and British counterparts.
A crucial element in the culture of colonialism
was the notion of the colonizers as the rightful
“proprietors” or “guardians” of the colonized.
This paternalistic attitude often manifested itself in
the management of indigenous heritage by the
colonial authorities. For example, during the late
phase of French colonization of North Africa, the
colonial authorities took on the mandate of preserving
the “native” city in its traditional, picturesque,
urban form. In cities like Casablanca and
Marrakesh, modern urban amenities such as
plumbing, sewage, and street lighting were
restricted to the European sections of the town.
This strategy denied the indigenous population
access to modernity by freezing them into the role
of tradition as defined by the colonizers.
The colonial project entailed the movement of
large populations of human labor and the subsequent
need for housing them in cities. In the late
nineteenth century the British colony of Trinidad
received 144,000 indentured laborers (mostly
Indian males) who were housed in barracks.