ancient cities

Constructed from the cheapest materials, the barracks
were essentially warehouses with several
rooms (often beds) in a row with shared facilities,
which offered very little in the way of privacy for
the individuals. Barrack housing was also common
in South Africa and was most famously used by
the De Beers diamond company in their mining
towns (such as Kimberly) to house their convict
labor. Here the barracks were arranged around a
courtyard and functioned as a closed compound,
where the activities of the inmates were monitored
as in a prison camp.
Continuing Legacies and New Empires
Does a colonial city stop being colonial when the
colonizers leave? The processes and apparatuses
put into place during the colonial era did not simply
disappear at the moment of decolonization,
and several cities continue to be shaped by the
legacies of colonialism. The vacuum of power left
behind by the departing colonizers was quickly
filled by local elites while the urban poor filled the
same roles and occupied the shantytowns that
were once the realm of the colonized indigene.
Urban segregation continues to define many cities
with a colonial legacy—albeit along the lines of
class and wealth as opposed to race. The legacy of
colonialism is also complicated by the fact that
there comes a point at which the formerly colonized
people cease to perceive their history as colonial
and begin to absorb colonial heritage into
their postcolonial narratives of national identity.
This is apparent in a case like Mexico, where
Spanish colonial architecture has now been coopted
as Mexican vernacular heritage.
Globalization has radically altered the form of
empire, and as imperial technologies change so do
colonial urban forms. A good example is that of
Guantánamo Bay: A piece of land occupied by the
Americans following the Cuban Spanish American
War of 1898, it is a self-sufficient U.S. naval base
that is a geographic, legal, and political state of
exception. A place where neither the U.S. Constitution
nor international law holds sway, Guantánamo
has been the site of incarceration for over 700 men
from 40 countries starting in early 2002. Labeled
as enemy combatants by the U.S. government
(rather than prisoners of war), the inmates are neither
protected by the Geneva Conventions nor have
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169
access to legal representation that alien prisoners
on U.S. soil would normally receive. The inhumane
conditions of shackled inmates trapped in
small isolated cells and under constant surveillance
are reminiscent of early penal colonies of the
British Empire in the Caribbean or internment
camps built by the United States during World
War II to segregate Japanese Americans from the
general population.
If indeed the colonial city is defined by the
urban manifestation of dominance by a minority
population over indigenes, then closer attention
must be paid to contemporary imperialism, which
manifests itself not in the normative spaces of
urbanism but rather in the spaces of exclusion,
incarceration, and torture. These may well be the
colonial cities of the present as well as the
future.
Nezar AlSayyad and
Mrinalini Rajagopalan
See also Capital City; New Delhi, India; Social Exclusion;
Urban Planning; World-Systems Perspective
Further Readings
Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1991. Before European Hegemony:
The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
AlSayyad, Nezar. 1992. Forms of Dominance: On the
Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise.
Brookfield, VT: Avebury.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1969. Capitalism and
Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical
Studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Home, Robert. 1997. Of Planting and Planning: The
Making of British Colonial Cities. London: Spon.
Kaplan, Amy. 2003. “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections
on Language and Space.” Radical History Review
85:82–93.
King, Anthony. 1976. Colonial Urban Development,
Culture, Social Power and Environment. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ross, Robert and Gerard J. Telkamp, eds. 1985. Colonial
Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context.
Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.