Colonial City Research Articles

Modernisasi Kota: Saluran Air Bersih Perpipaan di Jawa Masa Kolonial

The clean water pipeline is a project initiated and designed by the Dutch East Indies government to overcome the problem of water cleanliness in urban areas in the 20th century. At that time, clean water in colonial cities was becoming increasingly scarce due to population growth, among other things. The increasing number of residents causes water pollution in urban areas to increase. The colonial government realized the impact caused by the pollution. Several disease outbreaks began to emerge and attack the city community. Efforts to construct boreholes/artesian wells do not appear to be going as expected. Therefore, the government designed a clean water pipeline construction project to drain water from springs to the colonial city. After the construction of these new facilities, colonial cities underwent significant changes, such as an increase in living standards and cultural changes in urban communities.

The Port City of Haiphong, 1874–1940: The Position of the Chinese Community in a French Colonial City

This article discusses the position of the Chinese community in Haiphong, the largest port city in Northern Vietnam during the French colonial period. The Chinese had arrived and lived in Haiphong, as well as many other places in Vietnam long before the advent of the French. Nevertheless, a large-scale influx of Chinese migrants to Haiphong only happened after the French established colonial rule over Indochina and took full control of the town in the late nineteenth century. Haiphong became a strategic port in the transportation system of French Indochina, as well as within the French colonial empire. In Haiphong, the Chinese gathered in a separate residential quarter having the social and cultural life distinct from the French and Vietnamese communities. Yet, they were actively engaged in various economic activities of the town, notetably trade, intrustry, and financial services. The bombardment and occupation of Haiphong by the Japanese army in late 1940 caused great damages and casualties to the Chinese community. The prolonged warfares and the establishment of the communist regime in Vietnam after 1945 virtually ended the economic hegemony of the Chinese in Haiphong, as well other cities in Northern Vietnam.

The role of the diaspora: malaga, vā, and contesting the financialization of customary land in Samoa

ABSTRACT The settler colonial city has been described in relative isolation, detached from the global metropole, intent on internal enrichment through the deterritorialization of Indigenous people. This urban formation deploys familiar spatial techniques: legal borders, economic regions, and segregated enclaves. Yet for many Indigenous peoples, the relationship to land is not juridical, economic, nor socio-racial, it is genealogical. These genealogical ties to land extend the boundaries of settler-colonialism – and resistance to it – beyond the islands, across diasporic space. Decolonial Pacific studies describe a geography resistance to land reform among Indigenous and immigrant Pacific Islanders which exceeds and overspills the settler colonial city. Diasporic space – moving through and overspilling the settler colonial city – is the spatial context for understanding resistance to customary land reform in Samoa and the struggles of other Pacific Islanders against settler colonial processes of dispossession.

Industrial and cultural heritage of the Ma On Shan Iron Mine landscape and the making of industrious Hong Kong

Ma On Shan (MOS, literally ‘Saddle Hill’) is an extension of Shatin new town in Hong Kong. This area embeds the site of the now closed MOS Iron Mine and several related settlements at the Peak, Mid‐Level and Pier Districts. The history of the MOS Iron Mine landscape sheds important light on the city's post‐WWII development. The MOS is a typical historic urban landscape, a product of transnational urbanism, a joint‐venture of local and Japanese investments made possible by the Cold War, and the retreat of faith‐based organisations and poor refugees fleeing Chinese rule after 1949 practicing mutual support in a laissez‐faire colonial city. The Japanese trained miners, explosive operators, mechanics and construction workers of the MOS Iron Mine contributed to infrastructure developments of modern Hong Kong. The associated settlements also epitomise the industrious spirit of Hong Kongers in the face of international and regional political volatilities, absence of government support, material shortage and economic hardship. Embedded in the MOS Iron Mine landscape is not only valuable industrial heritage bequeathed by multi‐scalar transnational socio‐economic and political developments but also the cultural heritage of reciprocity and mutuality among community members in local economic development, knowledge with continuing relevance for city‐building today.

Drawing the “color line”: Race, ethnicity and religion in Diu

ABSTRACT This article explores how the ideas of race, ethnicity and religion shifted with modernity in Diu. While it concentrates on findings about Diu, the arguments it develops are more wide-ranging and have a series of architectural, urbanistic, and anthropological implications. It addresses the construction of identity by exploring the multiplicities and slippages of colonial imagery, social histories, and spatial production in the management of populations and colonial cities. We argue that the Portuguese shared ideologies rooted in race, ethnicity and religion that provide a consistent, detectable structure for a specific interpretation of spatial-morphological arrangements in Diu (the city’s buildings, architecture, urban layout, and spatial structure) in the context of the European colonial city in South Asia. We analyze the discourse with which the Portuguese created knowledge through cartography, tracing how ideologies linked to race, ethnicity and religion were historically internalized, and how they worked in conjunction with social structures and practices to produce the colonial city of Diu.

Layers of settler urbanization and indigenous relational place-making: uncovering an ongoing palimpsest

ABSTRACT Cities in settler colonial states imply a continuous settlement in Indigenous territories and on unceded land. With each layer of colonial enterprises, there is also Indigenous resistance to it, which in turn brings on new interruptions and displacements. Each layer relates to previous ones and, as an urban palimpsest, public spaces become multilayered places, with permanent processes of displacements and dispossession and re-territorialization and re-possession. And if the settler colonial city is a useful framework to understand the multiple layers of colonial processes happening in an urban public space, we suggest that the notion of the palimpsest enlightens also the multiple layers of Indigenous presence and continuous place-making as a resistance to these processes.

Settler urban geographies of decommissioned prisons: an invitation to a discussion

ABSTRACT As urban colonial prisons are becoming obsolete, cities must reckon with their enduring presence in landscapes that are continuously developing. Examining how decommissioned prisons are placed within urban development agendas in settler colonial cities, I consider the heritagisation of urban prisons as extractive; it captures and manipulates time through the juxtaposition of defunct carceral sites with the so-called “post” carceral city. This move is profitable for the city first since it generates “monopoly rent” from unique “cultural heritage” sites, and second since it “frees” urban land – now cleaned from its carceral past – for capitalist investment. Against this, the paper asserts that carcerality is a living structure of settler colonial cities. In these cities, racial capitalism has always been intertwined with punitive and extractive measures against Indigenous people, who remain unprecedently overrepresented in Australian prisons.

The Manama riots 1947: Bahraini Jews between Palestine and Gulf labour politics

ABSTRACT In December 1947, following the UN decision to divide Palestine, Bahrain’s Jewish community became the target of communal violence. As crowds protested the partition plan, Manama’s Jewish quarter was attacked and looted. In their aftermath, the Manama riots have been understood as a nationalist show of anger against Zionism, unfortunately unleashed against local Bahraini Jews. However, a close reading of events shows the riot as complex event involving local labour politics, anti-colonialism and Shi’a religious rituals. Drawing on British records, Jewish correspondence and personal memoirs, this paper locates the riot in its post-war Persian Gulf context and argues that it represented an encounter between regional politics of the Palestine Mandate and the post-war tensions of Manama as a late colonial oil city. While ostensibly driven by Arab opposition to Zionism, the riots also saw the culmination of socio-political tensions over labour and colonial rule, exacerbated by five years of war. As such, the Manama riots should be understood not only as an extension of emerging Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine, but also within the local politics of the post-war Persian Gulf.

Oceans, Archives, Perverts

This study follows the oceanic routes of female migrant laborers as a way to reconsider the geographies of queer theory through the colonial port city. In so doing, the author highlights feminized forms of migrant labor, including sex work and care work, as a central facet of the history of sexuality beyond the nation-state. This history begins in the 1920s and 1930s, when the League of Nations sponsored a massive investigation into international sex trafficking, through surveillance of port cities across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. These investigations reveal the ways that female migrant laborers were constructed as nonnormative sexual subjects, both through their transient status as citizens and for performing reproductive labors outside the context of the white nuclear family. In this way, the league investigation offers an early case study for technologies attending to the biological specificity necessary to detain individuals at the border. This biometric archive lays the groundwork for a theorization of queer femininity, often ignored by historians of sexuality focused on the criminalization of sodomy. Through attention to an early biometric database, rather than criminal archives, what follows offers a geography of feminized labor and queer femininity based across a transoceanic network of port cities. A consideration of sex work in the midcentury novel, including Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and J. G. Farrell's Singapore Grip, more closely establishes the biometric and aesthetic categories used to construct female sexual deviance at the midcentury.

World of Trouble: A Philadelphia Quaker Family’s Journey through the American Revolution

World of Trouble: A Philadelphia Quaker Family’s Journey through the American Revolution

The Re-orientalised Cosmopolitan Turn in Yangsze Choo’s “The Ghost Bride”

"The Re-Orientalised Cosmopolitan Turn in Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride. The magical realist bestseller The Ghost Bride (2013) by Yangsze Choo was adapted into a Netflix original series in 2020. The story revolves around the female protagonist, Pan Li Lan, whose hand has been requested to wed the late Lim Tian Ching, making it a “ghost marriage” or “spirit wedding,” and her, a ghost bride. With the financial woes that the Pan family is facing, Li Lan has to carefully consider this macabre proposal by the wealthy and prominent Lim family. In this article, the authors look at the novel and the Netflix series, The Ghost Bride and argue that it is a form of re-orientalised metropolitan cosmopolitanism, contrived for global consumption in the current global cultural marketplace. Set in 1893, in the colonial cosmopolitan port city of Malacca, the production employs the elite culture of the Peranakan Chinese and re-orientalises it. The critics will, therefore, examine the dynamics of re-orientalism and cosmopolitanism and eventually contend that the production of The Ghost Bride manifests a re-orientalised cosmopolitan turn in depicting a local culture for a global audience. Keywords: re-orientalism, metropolitan cosmopolitanism, magical realism, Peranakan Chinese, The Ghost Bride"

Developing the late colonial city: Strategies of a middle class housing cooperative in Mozambique, 1951–1975

From the end of the Second World War until independence from Portugal in 1975, the population and size of Lourenco Marques, today's Maputo, was growing rapidly. This also led to the expansion of the city's white middle class of mainly Portuguese origin. This paper analyses COOP, formerly one of Portugal's largest cooperatives, as a major organisation of this group. COOP played a crucial role in the provision of housing for Luso-Mozambicans and was an active private shareholder in the city's urbanisation. Drawing on sources from the COOP archive, the paper asks how COOP used urbanisation to mediate specific ideas for Lourenço Marques' urban future. Following this approach, it identifies three strategies the cooperative applied in reaction to the government's late colonial modernisation discourse.

Review: Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City

Review: <i>Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City</i>

Waste-to-wealth Activities of Scavengers: A Panacea to the Environmental Impact of Global Climate Change in Enugu Metropolis, Nigeria

Due to the increasing environmental hazards of climate change phenomenon, it has become a major concern of most environmentalist. Currently the world struggles to manage waste which are generated from human activity and it affects the global climate either positively or negatively. Therefore, particular attention should be paid to sustainable waste management strategy so as to ameliorate the issue. To this end, the 3-R concept of waste management (reduction, reuse and recycle) have been variously pursued by municipalities towards a sustainable waste management system. This study focused on the waste-to-wealth activities across the urban neighborhoods in the colonial city of Enugu and adopted a qualitative survey research design. Using stratified and simple random sampling technique, a survey was conducted in eight selected neighbourhood and orally interviewed waste pickers within the study area. It discusses solid waste disposal method in Enugu metropolis with a view to facilitating sustainable practices for enhanced environmental condition and wealth creation. The paramount theme is on the socio-economic networking of the waste-to-wealth activities in the area and the derivable benefits towards addressing the effects of global climate change phenomenon in the city. Its research results highlight the ineffective waste management system within the metropolis and showed that huge financial gains could be harvested from waste product. Also it revealed that waste picking is done on informal scale across all neighbourhoods in the study area. It concludes and recommends measures towards enhancing waste-to-wealth as a strategy for addressing the global climate change in the city.

The settler colonial city in three movements

This paper traces the trajectory of scholarship on the settler colonial city and argues that this literature could pay closer attention to the dynamic circulations, movements, and mobilities that constitute and sustain urban space. It foregrounds the ways that the movement of commodities, capital, and people must be assiduously managed in order to preserve settler colonial relations in the city and beyond. Building on existing work, it argues that “settler colonial urbanism” operates as a regime of spatial management which is connected to other sites of racial capitalist extraction and accumulation across global space.

Military or trade port cities? About the form and function of the Hispanic colonial cities in Latin America and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT This work studies urban form and function in Hispanic American colonial port cities. By combining different research questions and points of view, new insights are given into matters such as the origin of their urban grids, the development of their fortifications throughout the colonial era, and the military versus trade function they accomplished. The focus is on Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, with other Hispanic colonial cities also included in the discussion. The field work is based on primary literature about colonial laws and ordinances and the reports of several viceroys in the eighteenth century as well as a wide array of secondary literature in different languages. The results show that, while these cities fulfilled an important role as trade nodes, this function was second to their military role. However, both functions are found to be interdependent in a number of ways.

Relaying station for empires' outcasts: managing 'lunatics' in pre-World War II Hong Kong.

This article explores how 'lunatics' emerged and how they were managed beyond the capacity of institutionalization in colonial Hong Kong in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The story contests the conventional historiography about madmen that focuses on institutions. Unlike in Britain or in other East Asian colonial cities, inpatients stayed at the asylum only for very short periods. Instead of psychiatric admission, they were then transported by ship, either to Canton in China or to London for further care until after World War II. This article analyses how this was done to maintain a 'clean' cityscape, as well as an instrument to ensure the smooth operation of the port city.

The Enduring Effect of Cultural Brokerage: From Merchants and Missionaries to Foreign Firms (WITHDRAWN)

This study explores the largely neglected long-term effect of cultural brokerage on local community cultures and international business. We argue that communities with a rich history of cross-cultural exchange between locals and foreigners developed a local culture that continues to influence international business today. Drawing on a matched sample of 68 colonial cities and 80 neighboring cities in China, we connect local variation in central domains of cultural brokerage—trade and missionary activities in the late 19th and early 20th century—with foreign production today. Our results demonstrate the long-term implications of socially-built cultural capacities on local strategies of action and challenge the dominant legalistic approach in colonial heritage research.

City connectivity via global intra‐firm linkages: An analysis of Indian cities

AbstractThis paper analyses the global connectivity of Indian cities to understand the varying pace of city growth in the context of Indian Urban Development. Using Globalisation and World City (GaWC) network's 2016 data, this paper examines each city's connectivity via their intra‐firm–office transactions. First, Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore were identified as the top‐most group strongly linked with the advanced economies in North America and Europe. Second, India's second category cities—Chennai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad—had dominant connectedness with South Asian cities growing at a moderate pace. Third, the lowest‐tier cities—Allahabad, Nagpur and Nashik—were fast catching up with their global service activities, demonstrating India's emerging South–South multilateral cooperation. Confirming to the global urban literature, the above pattern reflects those greater intra‐firm linkages that contributed to higher connectivity between cities, being leveraged through the ICT infrastructure growing beyond the primary (X) citiesto engage smart (Y) cities. This finding provides evidence against postcolonial critiques that argued for place‐specific history of colonial cities explaining emerging geographies.

When Modern Housing Built Optimistic Suburbia: A Comparative Analysis Between Lisbon and Luanda

Throughout the 1960s, the urban peripheries in several Portuguese colonial cities embarked on a profound process of transformation. With different urban histories and distant geographical contexts, Lisbon and Luanda were united by urban planning and public policies defined by the Estado Novo’s response to the lack of housing supply. The neighbourhoods that expressed modern affiliation in their architecture witnessed profound changes brought about by the April 25th Revolution and the consequent process of democracy in Portugal (1974) and independence in Angola (1975). This article proposes a comparative analysis of middle-class housing complexes, demystifying the urban peripheries by an optimistic architecture that helped shape the built environment and echoed its time’s urban and political concerns. It analyses four case studies, taking into account their inherent characteristics (urban layout, architecture, and interior design), their significance as a testimony to the social and political aspirations of the time, and the quality of life and lifestyles of their current population. It draws on sociological surveys and analysis of plans, photographs, and maps to carry out a broader picture of modern housing through the work of Fernando Silva in Lisbon and Fernão Simões de Carvalho in Luanda. Based on current research, this article aims to assess the resilience of these neighbourhoods by analysing the housing landscape from an urban and architectural perspective. By mapping the changes after 50 years of use, the intention is to understand how they have adapted to current conditions (urban and social) and support future actions.