Postcolonial Urbanism

Abstract

Postcolonial urbanism encompasses a range of scholarship in urban studies that engages with postcolonial theory, postcoloniality as a historico-political status, and postcolonial criticism of urban theory. There is not a singular concept of postcolonialism. A rudimentary definition of postcolonialism as the study of the lasting effects of being a former colony confines it to a historical category, which dissonant voices have largely displaced. In place of a conceptual uniformity, postcolonial urbanism can rather be understood as a kind of intervention, in terms of both the places and issues at the core of its concern, as well as an intervention into the way that urban research and theory is being generated. Building on postcolonial thought from the 20th century that emerged from a period of decolonial and anticolonial political struggle and largely defined by key scholarship in the humanities, postcolonial urbanism translates these concepts and questions for urban space, urban research and urban theory. The analysis of power, representation, and identity is transmuted for a spatial analysis of urbanization, urban development, and urban life. This is particularly evident in the postcolonial scholarship on urban planning and architecture, which situates the built environment within a contextual postcoloniality or applies a postcolonial lens to analyzing the cultures of planning or architecture. Moreover, the critiques of discipline that postcolonial theory espouses are also adopted in postcolonial urbanism in the watershed of scholarship on issues around knowledge production in urban studies. These have spurred debates around the parochialism of urban theory, the nature of theory, and the comparative approaches that could possibly enrich theoretical developments. In parallel to these epistemological debates is a rich scholarship with a long tradition in area studies that continue to delve into the question of alternative urbanisms, seeing the postcolonial world as determined category of shared experience, which may help generate various forms of “Southern” urbanisms. The key question here is whether postcolonial urbanism serves more as a theoretical intervention into the way that urban theory is generated, or an empirical intervention into the sites and concerns of urban theory. The scholarship shows that these positions are not easily extricated from one another. Out of this lively debate has emerged an outpouring of influential conceptual developments particularly in theorizing urban everyday life around topics like informality, periphery, grey space, waste, and utopia.