Postcolonial Cities

A. D. King, State University of New York Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, USA

& 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Definitions
In everyday usage, postcolonial cities refer to those cities
(frequently capitals) in what were previously colonial
societies. In addition to this temporal or historical use of
the term, however, postcolonial may also imply a particular critique, one which not only emphasizes the distinctive impact which colonialism has had on the
economy, society, culture, spatial form, and architecture
of the city but also on the way the city itself is understood and represented. Thus, some postcolonial critics
would reject or deny representations of cities as postcolonial, arguing that this privileges a particular (usually
Western) interpretation of the city at the expense of a
more indigenous one. As the terms imperialism and colonialism are often used interchangeably, in what follows,
imperialism refers to the imposition of the power of one
state over the territories of another, frequently by military force. Where imperialism originates in the metropole, what happens in the colonies resulting from
economic, political, and cultural control and domination
is colonialism, even though this can take various forms.
While the term postcolonial can be used to apply to all
historical and geographical instances of colonialism,
whether of the Romans in Britain, the Japanese in Korea,
or the English in Ireland, this article focuses on European
industrial colonialism and its aftermath in the nonEuropean world.
In a less-frequent usage, the term postcolonial cities
refers to those capitals or major cities of the one-time
imperial metropoles, such as Paris, London, Birmingham,
or Amsterdam, not only because of the large postcolonial
populations they have attracted following the formal end
of empire and independence of what were previously
colonies, but also because for migrants from these excolonies, for example, Paris or London is a postcolonial
city. The term can also be used more metaphorically to
refer, for example, to cities in Eastern Europe, previously
under the hegemonic control of the Soviet Union. Irrespective of the different uses of the term, understanding the meaning of the postcolonial city presupposes
familiarity with the inextricably connected concept of the
colonial city.

Origins of Interest in Postcolonial Cities

in Human Geography and the Social
Sciences
In the 30 years following World War II, over 70 states,
previously European colonies, gained their political if not
economic independence. From the mid-1950s, a number
of mainly North American and European social scientists
(geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists), studying
aspects of urbanization in Asia, Africa, and the Middle
East, began to identify distinctive social, spatial, and
cultural characteristics of towns and cities in recently
decolonized countries where European traders, settlers,
and colonial officials had lived (or were still living) and
whose urban development they had largely controlled.
With the departure of the former colonial power, these
colonial towns and cities had now been inherited by the
newly liberated subjects of the independent nation. What
these studies described were dual cities, ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated between the European
town and native settlement; the first, modern, spacious,
low density, well maintained through the use of town
planning, and culturally different from the surrounding
environment; the second, usually separated from the first
by parks, railway lines, or open space, invariably more
densely settled, with traditional housing, social and cultural buildings overcrowded, and lacking in services and
infrastructural provision. A powerful condemnation of
this phenomenon from French Algeria that simultaneously conveys the sense of oppression and injustice
experienced by members of the colonized society is that
of the Martiniquan nationalist writer, Frantz Fanon, in his
oft-cited critique of colonialism, Les Damne de la Terre :
The colonial world is a world divided into compartments
y of native quarters and European quarters, of schools
for natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way
we need not recall apartheid in South Africa y The
colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line,
the frontiers, are shown by barracks and police stations.
In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who
are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesman of
the settler and his rule of oppression y The settlers
town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel
y The town belonging to the colonized people, or at
least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the

Postcolonial Cities
reservation, is a place of ill fame y It is a world without
spaciousness, men live on top of each other y The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a
town wallowing in the mire. (Frantz Fanon, 1961: 3739)

While this dual-cities phenomenon, though varying

greatly between different places, was widely recognized,
it is evident from the mid-1960s comments of American
sociologist, Janet Abu-Lughod, that, despite the occasional observations mentioned above, the subject had not
yet attracted serious theoretical or policy-related attention, either from local or foreign observers:
The major metropolis in almost every newly-industrialising country is not a single unified city, but, in fact,
two quite different cities, physically juxtaposed but
architecturally and socially distinct y These dual cities
have usually been a legacy from the colonial past. It is
remarkable that such a phenomenon has remained almost unstudied. (Janet Abu-Lughod, 1965: 420)

The years which followed witnessed a number of

serious attempts to remedy this situation. The interest in
human geography and other disciplines came from two
sources. One was the growing dissatisfaction among
geographers, sociologists, and others, increasingly familiar with cities outside the West, of the inadequate state of
comparative urban theory at this time. This was seen as
largely based on Western industrial experience with
theories of urban and city growth dominated by the work
of the Chicago School. For these scholars, serious
thinking about the concept of the colonial city and theories of colonial urban development were to take place
between the late 1960s and mid-1970s.
The second impetus came from urban professionals
concerned with policy-related issues of urban development planning following the end of colonial rule. It was
in these two, often interrelated, contexts that a more
theoretically informed understanding of the notion of
both the colonial and postcolonial city developed. It was
an understanding which recognized that, despite political
independence, the persistence of colonial structures
represented among others by the grossly unequal social
and spatial divisions of major cities was an affront to the
democratic aspirations of newly independent nations.
This colonial space of the European part of the city and
its distance from the native settlement was not just based
on the standards and specifications of the so-called
modern city in the West; in many cases, in order to satisfy
the political and cultural demands of the colonial elite, it
also represented a gross inflation of these standards. In
many postcolonial cities, decades after independence,
while the native area of the city crumbled under pressure
from rapid migration, indigenous elites occupied the
spaces vacated by their foreign predecessors.

In addition to these real spatial inequalities, however,

the newly independent nation was faced with additional
symbolic contradictions in the city. In different colonial
towns and capital cities, the architecture and urban design of the imperial power, whether modest or grandiose,
had been consciously conceived to convey cultural as
well as political authority. For the political elite of the
new postcolonial nation, removing monuments and replacing street names with those of their own folk heroes
was relatively simple; however, endowing the city with a
totally new national identity, one that draws on its own
vernacular cultures, representational spaces, and modes
of signification, was not only a much longer-term project
but also, because of competing regional, ethnic, linguistic,
and other tensions in newly established nation-states, a
deeply contentious one. Moreover, more immediate
priorities had to be addressed, such as political stability,
land redistribution, economic development, or providing
shelter for the burgeoning population in squatter settlements. In this context, transforming the image of the city,
projecting a new identity, had usually taken second place
on a new nations agenda. In India, for example, it took
almost 40 years after independence for the names of
Indias one-time colonial port cities, such as Bombay,
Madras, Calcutta, to be vernacularized as Mumbai,
Chennai, and Kolkatta, respectively.

Representing the City

As with the term postcolonial itself, it can be argued that
the category of the postcolonial city is more of an outsiders than insiders label. It privileges a representation
of the city which foregrounds its colonial past, rather
than the citys present or future. In this sense, postcolonial can carry the meaning of the failure of decolonization. Is the once-colonial city destined to be
forever postcolonial or can it, like Hong Kong or
Singapore, gradually metamorphose into a world or
global city? The mutability of categories applies equally
to other terms used over the last 50 years with reference
to other cities in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Where
world space is couched within a developmentalist
framework, rather than one of colonialism and postcolonialism, the same cities are referred to as Third
World Cities, a phrase coming into use following the
invention of the Three Worlds paradigm in the early
1950s. In this conceptual framework, they are represented
not with regard to issues of cultural identity, heritage, and
questions of representation, but rather in relation to inadequate water and shelter provision, unemployment,
and overburdened infrastructure. As all such representational categories emanate from a globally dominant
anglophone positionality and a discourse originating in
the West, it follows that they are either contested or

Postcolonial Cities

rarely used by the inhabitants of the city itself, whether

urban professionals or local residents. However, since the
late twentieth century, new research and scholarship on
the colonial and postcolonial city by scholars native to
the city has resulted in original and interesting perspectives on both.

Revisiting the Colonial and Postcolonial

City
While the earlier studies of colonial and postcolonial
cities (principally in English, though also in French and
Spanish) produced during the first three or four decades
following the end of colonial rule might be described as
the first critical accounts of such cities, they have generally located the topic within a European or EuroAmerican frame of reference. Moreover, as they were
generally based on European archives and language
sources, the agency for the cities development has frequently been primarily accorded to their European inhabitants, with less attention paid to that of the
indigenous population. Since the late twentieth century,
however, studies by scholars native to the city or country,
drawing on previously unused sources, often in local
languages, have begun to transform this perspective.
Accounts of the development of Singapore, for instance,
based on a detailed study of local archives, have challenged the notion of the colonial city as simply the
outcome of dominant (Western) forces. They represent
the city as a product of indigenous, local agency where
the colonized have maintained substantial control over
their lives.
Other recent studies of the colonial city have challenged one of the dominant themes of these earlier EuroAmerican studies, namely, the ethnic, racial, social, and
spatial divide between the indigenous city and the
European colonial settlement. Detailed historical studies
of Delhi, for example, drawing on a variety of different
local archives, have questioned the use of dualistic categories of colonizer/colonized, traditional/modern,
European/native, old/new, and shown that social and
spatial divisions in the city were not nearly so clear cut as
has been represented. Instead, there were charged
interconnections between the two spaces. The new colonial settlement offered opportunities for some Indian
residents to move between cultures and spaces, constructing new identities, identifying with the new by
rejecting the old, and creating indigenous modernities. A
similar study of Calcutta, making use of local languages,
challenges an oft-repeated colonial representation of the
city as a space marked by a Manichean division between
the European city and the black town. While such labels certainly exist on European maps and in the
anglophone colonial records, helping to confirm

European perceptions of the city, they (and similar

terms) are absent in local Bengali accounts of the city,
and hence, do not inhibit the movement or activities of
local inhabitants. For them, the meaning of the city is not
constructed through a perception of colonial spatial
divisions but rather as a cradle of Bengal nationalism.
These recent accounts, postcolonial in both senses of
the term, show that the space of the colonial city is both
ambiguous and contested. Most importantly, attitudes
have changed over time. The same is true of the postcolonial city, a concept not easy to define. What has
happened in the decades since it first came into use is
that its meaning has fluctuated, not least because the
conditions in which the postcolonial city exists have also
changed. This is most clearly seen in relation to the
postcolonial Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Here, following the end of Dutch colonial rule in the mid-twentieth century, social and political oppression not only
returned during the three decades (196698) of President
Suhartos dictatorial New Order regime, but also their
severity and scope increased. In this context, the urban,
housing, and architectural developments undertaken by
the Dutch have, by comparison, been seen by an Indonesian scholar as relatively enlightened, a colonial gift
inherited by the postcolonial society and state. Clearly,
however, not all postcolonial accounts of colonial cities
are so benign.
In this context, how is the postcolonial city recognized? This is not easily answered as cities are not necessarily postcolonial in the same way. The most drastic
solution to transforming the colonial city and, in the
process, changing the publics sense of commitment to
the nation and promoting a sense of national pride, is to
shift the geographical location of the capital, not only
building a new city on a new site, but also using spectacular vernacular architecture and an indigenous name
to do so, a strategy adopted by Sri Lanka in shifting its
capital from Colombo to Sri Jayawardhanapura Kotte.
Less dramatic is the construction of a new capitol or
parliament building, a strategy adopted by Bangladesh,
Papua New Guinea, and Kuwait, among others. Elsewhere, as in Indias capital city, the lavish spatial layout of
the central areas of New Delhi has, over the half-century
since independence, been re-densified by the addition of
numerous government buildings. Toponymic reinscription is a common way of reclaiming the cultural space of
city streets. The urban and architectural attributes of the
one-time colonial city can also be treated as part of the
citys inheritance and used for the promotion of tourism.
Yet such policies are invariably contested. For some, but
not for others, half a century after independence, the
symbolic significance of colonial buildings has lost its
oppressive meaning and become an apolitical part of the
nations heritage. While such a policy may be enthusiastically endorsed by UNESCOs International

Postcolonial Cities

Committee on Monuments and Sites, it can be bitterly

resisted by local groups.
In other cities, such as Brazilia, Chandigarh, or Islamabad, modernist architecture has been combined with
nationalist rhetoric to create new images for the nation.
From the late twentieth century, constructing the worlds
highest building, as in Malaysias Kuala Lumpur or
Taiwans capital, Taipei, has become an essentially
competitive strategy for postcolonial nations to put
themselves on the map and make claims on others
definitions of modernity. In all these strategies, the aim is
to convey to the citys inhabitants a new sense of national
citizenship, a new collective consciousness.
Yet, irrespective of these changes to the physical environment, inherent structures of power, inherited from
the colonial regime and institutionalized in the centralizing and authoritarian practices of city and state bureaucracies leave an indelible scar on the urban landscape,
not least in the post-apartheid cities of South Africa.
Cities: Postcolonial or Postimperial?
So far, it has been assumed that postcolonial cities refer
primarily to those cities existing in formerly colonized
societies. Yet the distinction between postcolonial and
postimperial cities can be ambivalent, depending on the
position and location of the speaker. Labeling Paris or
London as (technically) postimperial cities foregrounds
their earlier imperial role without necessarily invoking
imperial contexts. Yet postcolonial is increasingly used to
describe them, not only because of the ethnic and racial
composition of their populations but also because of their
public culture and civil society, including matters of
education, politics, religion, and culture, among others.
As world space is simultaneously global, postcolonial, and
colonial (among other categories), postcolonial histories
of migration not only distinguish the population, politics,
and culture of one postcolonial (or postimperial) city
from another but also from other world or global cities,
such as Frankfurt, Chicago, or Zurich. For example, of
the roughly one-third of population of New York that is
foreign born, over half are from the Caribbean and
Central America, with significant proportions from
Europe, South America, and South and Southeast Asia.
Any explanation for the presence of a substantial portion
of that population, particularly the English-speaking
migrants from the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia,
has to take account of colonial and postcolonial histories.
This is equally the case with the Spanish-speaking migrants from the Caribbean and Central and South
America. In London, of the roughly one-fifth of the
population that is foreign born, the large majority is
principally from postcolonial countries, particularly
South and Southeast Asia, Ireland, East, West and South
Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Australia, as

well as from continental Europe. The same is true of

Paris, where about one-fifth of the population is foreign
born; of these, a substantial proportion are primarily from
postcolonial North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), or Mauritius. Of the legal immigrants in Lisbon,
many are from Portuguese ex-colonies such as Brazil,
Angola, Cape Verde islands, and Macau.
These distinctively postcolonial migrations have
major influences on the economy, society, culture, religion, politics, spatial and built environments, and also
security, of the city. They bring to the global city a
variety of vibrant postcolonial cosmopolitanisms specific
to the city (and the state) where they exist. Numerically
or economically powerful postcolonial minorities can
bring their influence to bear on government policies, both
domestic (in regard to immigration, education, or welfare) or foreign (in relation to foreign policy, international disputes, and disaster relief) or in regard to
public culture, the arts, dress codes, and media. They
shape the definition and nature of multiculturalism and
create new forms of hybridity in different cultural realms,
whether in regard to language, religion, literature, or the
arts. Understood in this sense, the postcolonial city can
be said to generate not only multiple temporalities but
also multiple spatialities. These extend the real and the
virtual space of the city and its inhabitants to other urban
and rural locations worldwide.
The significance of these real and virtual spaces can be
seen in the growing outsourcing of employment (especially in call centers) from cities in North America,
Europe, and the UK to the large anglophone labor
markets in South and Southeast Asian cities, an aspect of
globalization that cannot be understood without reference to a postcolonial urban frame. Employment outsourcing has generated both extensive employment
opportunities and also office building in major metropolitan Indian cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and
Delhi. In Paris, most postcolonial minorities (mainly
North African) are in the banlieues which, from the late
twentieth century, have concentrated the socially and
economically marginalized in the peripheral areas of
French cities. Structurally equivalent to British and
American inner-city areas, and often referred to as
ghettos, the banlieues provide a space to develop a separate cultural agenda where the inhabitants reterritorialize housing projects that were previously socially
anonymous. In Britain, the urban landscapes of (especially) eastern, western, and southern inner suburbs of
the postcolonial global city of London have been regenerated and transformed by South Asians, a large
proportion of whom, while being united by and sharing
the same religion, are nonetheless divided along national
and ethnic lines. In the urban enclaves and terraced
housing of Britains second major postcolonial city of
Birmingham, the largest group of South Asian Muslims

Postcolonial Cities

are from Pakistan, comprising 7% of the citys population. The east Midlands, manufacturing city of
Leicester, with almost 30% of its 280 000 population
from South Asia, occasionally described as Europes
largest Indian city must also be the most postcolonial of
this continent. In the words of Singapore geographer,
Brenda Yeoh, not only are the colonial city and imperial
city umbilically connected in terms of economic linkages as well as cultural hybridization but their postequivalents y need to be analyzed within a single
postcolonial framework of intertwining histories and
relations. In this context, policies of colonial urbanism in
the one-time colonies can also be seen as being related to
the development of racial and class divisions in major
Western cities. However, it has to be underlined that
individual urban authorities in different countries have
their own distinctive policies, whether in regard to
questions of housing, planning, education, or other
spheres. In multicultural societies, it can be expected that
members of particular communities, particularly if they
are of recent settlement origin, stay together, with access
to their own shops, social centers, and places of worship
(as, for example, was also the case with British and other
European and American communities abroad).
Long after the formal end of empire, postcolonial
memories and associations continue to affect the use of
spaces in the one-time imperial city. Debates over historic sites in the City of London, for example, remembered as the economic and financial center of the Empire,
have been used to influence subsequent decisions about
urban design. Memories of empire have been kept alive
through maintaining the historical importance of particular places. Yet, postcolonial as well as postimperial
memories can also be celebratory for the multicultural
population of the city. This consciousness points to a
changing, vibrant future, a new kind of intellectual milieu
created by new ethnicities, hybridized identities, and
diasporas that create new and distinctive cultures in each
unique, geographically and culturally specific postcolonial city. Whether in the cities of the one-time
metropole or the one-time colony, postcolonialism creates both the split, as well as the suture, between traditional and modern identities. It is inextricably linked to
the creation of plural societies and transnational cultures.
The more metaphorical (rather than literal) use of the
terms, colonial/postcolonial, have also been deployed to
refer to urban processes in contemporary Europe. With
migrant labor, legal as well as illegal, arriving from all
over the world, including postcommunist Eastern Europe, filling the lowest-paid slots in an ever-increasingly
globalized economy, there are new colonized populations
in Western cities. In this context, features that to a greater
or lesser extent distinguish postcolonial populations, such
as a language shared with the host society, some familiarity with the laws, culture, and social practices of the

metropolitan society, a shared, if contested, history, the

presence of long-established communities, are features
which, among others, differentiate postcolonial communities and migrants from those of nonpostcolonial
origin. In the context of these criteria, multicultural
Berlin or Zurich differs from multicultural London or
Paris.
Various scholars have shown how the postcolonial
paradigm has been expanded to cover many historical
and geographical instances. Though not sufficient in
themselves, postcolonial histories, sociologies, and geographies are nonetheless key to the understanding of a
plethora of issues, not just in the multicultural, postcolonial, and postimperial global cities, such as Hong
Kong, Toronto, or Amsterdam, but in many other cities
worldwide. The growth of a postcolonial urban perspective in the last two decades is a result of globalization
and migration as well as the extension of virtual worlds
through the spread of information and communications
technology. It is an essentially comparative, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal perspective. It results not only
from observations of postcolonially mobile authors and
their postcolonial mobile readers, but also from more
sophisticated interpretations of globalization, from the
viewpoint of countries and religious cultures outside the
West.
The nature of what is postcolonial about the postcolonial city can be radically different in different places
and at different times. What is meant by the phrase must
always be elicited on the basis of the specific historical,
cultural, and political circumstances in which each
postcolonial city exists.
See also: Categorisation; Colonialism I; Globalization I;
Imperial Cities; Multicultural City; National Identity;
Positionality; Post-colonial identities; Race; Urban
architecture; Urban design; World/Global cities.

Further Reading
Abu-Lughod, J. (1965). Tale of two cities; the origins of modern Cairo.
Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, 429--457.
Bishop, R., Phillips, J. and Yeo, W. W. (eds.) (2003). Postcolonial
Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes. London:
Routledge.
Chattopadhyay, S. (2005). Representing Calcutta: Modernity,
Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny. London: Routledge.
Drakakis-Smith, D. W. (1987). The Third World City. London: Methuen.
Fanon, F. (1961). Les Damnes de la Terre, pp 3739. Paris: Francois
Maspero (The Wretched of the Earth (1968). New York: Grove.
Transl. Farrington, C.).
Horvath, R. V. (1969). In search of a theory of urbanization: Notes on the
colonial city. East Lakes Geographer 5, 69--82.
Hosagrahar, J. (2005). Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Urban
Form. London: Routledge.
Jacobs, J. (1996). Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City.
London: Routledge.

Postcolonial Cities

Kincaid, A. (2006). Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built

Environment. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
King, A. D. (1976). The post-colonial city. In Colonial Urban
Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment, ch. 11, pp
282288. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan & Paul.
King, A. D. (1990). Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy:
Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System.
London: Routledge.
King, A. D. (2004). Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism,
Identity. London: Routledge.
Kusno, A. (2000). Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space
and Political Cultures in Indonesia. London: Routledge.
Legg, S. (2007). Spaces of Colonialism: Delhis Urban
Governmentalities. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mabogunje, A. (1968). Urbanization in Nigeria. London: University of
London.
McGee, T. G. (1967). The Southeast Asian City. London: Bell.

Perera, N. (1998). Decolonising Ceylon: Colonialism, Nationalism, and

the Politics of Space in Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Rayfield, J. R. (1974). Theories of urbanization and the colonial city in
West Africa. Africa 44, 163--185.
Ross, R. and Telkamp, G. J. (eds.) (1985). Colonial Cities: Essays on
Urbanism in a Colonial Context. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
Sidaway, J. D. (2000). Postcolonial geographies: An exploratory essay.
Progress in Human Geography 24, 591--612.
Yeoh, B. S. A. (2001). Postcolonial cities. Progress in Human
Geography 25(3), 456--468.

Relevant Websites
http://www.iniva.org
Paul Gilroy: London: Postcolonial City, CelloidCities at Iniva.