Writing the Global City

Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban

Anthony King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317362715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Over the last three decades, our understanding of the city worldwide has been revolutionized by three innovative theoretical concepts – globalisation, postcolonialism and a radically contested notion of modernity. The idea and even the reality of the city has been extended out of the state and nation and re-positioned in the larger global world.

In this book Anthony King brings together key essays written over this period, much of it dominated by debates about the world or global city. Challenging assumptions and silences behind these debates, King provides largely ignored historical and cultural dimensions to the understanding of world city formation as well as decline. Interdisciplinary and comparative, the essays address new ways of framing contemporary themes: the imperial and colonial origin of contemporary world and global cities, actually existing postcolonialisms, claims about urban and cultural homogenisation and the role of architecture and built environment in that process. Also addressed are arguments about indigenous and exogenous perspectives, Eurocentricism, ways of framing vernacular architecture, and the global historical sociology of building types. Wide-ranging and accessible, Writing the Global City provides essential historical contexts and theoretical frameworks for understanding contemporary urban and architectural debates. Extensive bibliographies will make it essential for teaching, reference and research.

Methodologies

Case studies in globalisation and imperialism

Chapter 7: Actually existing postcolonialisms: colonial urbanism and architecture after the postcolonial turn¹

The internal mental structures of colonial power outlive their epoch. Habits of thought, from the most inconsequential practices of everyday life through to the most highly formalized systems of philosophical abstraction, still reproduce inherited and often unseen colonial mentalities.

(Bill Schwartz ‘Actually existing postcolonialism’ 2000:16)

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I focus quite narrowly on what is represented as ‘actually existing’ postcolonial urbanism and architecture as well as ‘actually existing’ postcolonial writing on this topic. In both cases, of course, these are textual representations – but as representations don’t exist independently of the material realities they attempt to represent, I will not labour this point here.

At what was possibly the first conference or workshop to be held on ‘Colonial Cities’ over 30 years ago my paper concluded with the following statement: ‘What my unilateral view’ (on the colonial city) ‘has underplayed is the contribution of the indigenous society and culture. The next book on ‘colonial’ or ‘ex-colonial’ cities might come from representatives of those cities themselves’ (King, 1985:27).² I did not imply at that time, nor do I here, that ‘location’ should be treated as an ‘essence’ which, irrespective of other factors, would give the indigenous inhabitants of the one-time colonial city a privileged insight. As Young writes in his book, Postcolonialism (2001),

Nowadays, no one really knows where an author ‘is’ when they read a book, apart from guarded information about institutional affiliation on the dust jacket, and nor should it matter. The difference is less a matter of geography than where individuals locate themselves as speaking from, epistemologically, politically, culturally and politically, who they are speaking to and how they define their own enunciative space

(Young 2001:62)

While I would, in principle, agree with this, it is also the case that, generally speaking, it is statistically more likely that members of the one-time colonised society (rather than that of the coloniser) are not only fluent in the colonial as well as the national language, but possibly also in local and regional languages of the one-time colonised state. They may also have better knowledge of (if not always access to) local sources. Exactly where scholars do their research, where they write it up, and the intellectual, social, political, cultural and other environments which influence their subjective identities may have more or less importance. Hence, while accepting Young’s statement, I have in the following account nevertheless aimed to identify interpretations which are not only recent but also produced primarily by indigenous scholars from the one-time colonised society.

The works I address here fall into one or both of two categories. First, postcolonial studies of contemporary or near contemporary developments in postcolonial cities which have a particular focus on urban space and form, socio-spatial structure and aspects of architectural design. The second category, what I shall call ‘postcolonial writings’, are accounts by scholars who, in giving agency and voice to the (historically) once-colonised, are both contesting and re-writing the history, geography and architecture of the one-time colonial city or ‘colonial urbanism’ broadly conceived. In either case, scholars might be located, permanently or temporarily, in the post colony, post metropolis, any other part of the anglophonic postcolonial empire (e.g. USA, Australia, Canada, Singapore or elsewhere). Though the majority of the accounts refer to South and Southeast Asia, this chapter by no means attempts to be comprehensive. Its purpose is rather to foreground some questions raised in the accounts and ask about conditions that gave raise to their production.

POSTCOLONIAL URBANISM: KOLKATA, DELHI, MUMBAI

If one of the most pressing analytical questions is to see ‘what the colonial and the postcolonial have done to each other’ (Kusno 2000), the next is to ask what the global is doing to the postcolonial, and vice versa. This is addressed by Sanjoy Chakravorty in ‘From colonial city to globalizing city? The far-from-complete spatial transformation of Kolkata’ (Chakravorty 2000).

As with other studies, urban geographer Chakravorty nests his analysis of the spatial structure of Calcutta in a three-phase frame of political economic development: colonial economy during the first global period; postcolonial (or command) economy during a nationalist period; and reform economy during the second global period (ibid.:57). He makes a number of assertions. That while the colonial city was ‘deeply divided’ between colonisers and natives it ‘would be wrong to assume that this spatial division was strictly enforced’ (p.65). Nonetheless, the thrust of his argument is to show that ‘this basic structure, created in the eighteenth century, still dominates the spatial pattern of work and home in the city’ (p.66). With independence in 1947, ‘the spatial divisions of the colonial city (demarcated by class and race barriers) were largely retained, with the native upper class (capital and land owners, political leaders and top government officials) now occupying the privileged space once occupied by the colonizers’ (p.67). The new (postcolonial) space retained much of this inheritance with the race divisions being replaced by class divisions with some residential segregation by occupation, religion, caste and ethnicity continued into the postcolonial period.

With the coming of the ‘new’ economy and the ‘post-reform city’, a more significant change has taken place in Indian society, where there is increasing (and more acceptable) social, cultural, and technological polarization (p.70) with new town projects, and an expanded international airport, though with these new towns, ‘colonies’ named after specific corporations (e.g. AVB colony, MAMC colony), apparently following well-worn (colonial) Public Works Department practices.

Concluding that Kolkata’s spatial structure ‘cannot be separated from its political economic history’ (p.72) Chakravorty states that it is quite different from its more colonial counterparts, ‘the more segregated, hierarchical, monolingual Chennai (Madras) or the dynamic, polyglot, recently chauvinistic Mumbai’. Unlike Mumbai and Delhi, Kolkata has not been plagued by communal riots and ‘the bourgeois planning apparatus has worked and continues for the benefit of the upper classes’ (p.74).

Chakravorty’s analysis might be fairly characterised as a straightforward political economic narrative. Another recent paper on a similar topic, though in this case referring to Delhi, demonstrates that postcolonial analysis can be more political. Cultural geographers Chatterjee and Kenny (1999) argue that, despite five decades of independence, attempts to bridge the vast spatial, social, economic and infrastructural inequities, as well as religious, cultural and lifestyle differences, between old and new Delhi, the legacy of hegemonic colonial planning, and create a single capital symbolising the unity and identity of the nation, have yet to be resolved. In offering reasons for this, the authors point to the essential ambiguities of the postcolonial: the fact that ‘the replacement of previous hierarchies of space, power and knowledge has not been complete’; ‘Muslim, Hindu and western socio-cultural norms co-exist, albeit uneasily, in Delhi’s built environment’ (p.96). Multiple identities produce a multiplicity of spatialities.

While the book Bombay: The Cities Within (1995), by architect Rahul Mehrotra and journalist Sharada Dwivedi, is clearly about colonial and postcolonial Bombay (since 1996, officially known, in a consciously postcolonial gesture, by its precolonial name of Mumbai), the narrative does not take a politically conscious postcolonial position, as implied in Sidaway’s second interpretation of that term. The treatment of the historical evolution of the built environment of Mumbai is treated even-handedly, without any particular reference to the power hegemonies, and even apolitically. The book ‘looks at the city with a sense of nostalgia while also with the intention of portraying aspects of the past that have continued relevance in terms of … approaches to the physical forms that result from these….’ The book treats urban form as ‘the text of the city’ (p.6). As the Introduction begins by stating that ‘Bombay was not an indigenous city but was built by the British expressly for maintaining trade links with India’ (p.9) the colonial presence is taken for granted, a fait accompli, not worth contesting. Whether writing of the many ancient as well as more recent Hindu shrines, sacred tanks, Buddhist temples, Muslim mosques, Moghul palaces or British colonial administrative, commercial or government buildings, all are treated as resources or heritage and not as material objects on which to exercise a cultural or socio-political critique. There is no large ideological divide or difference read into the activities and policies of city planners before or after 1947. As the authors have a deep commitment to urban design and conservation, every building, every space, is regarded as a neutral, unpoliticised historical and aesthetic resource. ‘Today’, they write, ‘the city’s image comprises of strange yet familiar juxtapositions – a roadside Hindu shrine abuts St Thomas’s Cathedral, chimney stacks are dwarfed by skyscrapers, fishing villages and slums nestle at the foot of luxury apartments, and bazaars occupy the Victorian arcades’ (p.309). In ‘One space, Two Worlds’, the social (and also urban design) critique is reserved for the major force which is seen to have impacted and dominated the city in the last four decades, ‘distress migration’. Only at this point is there a passing reference to the potential of colonial power:

Undoubtedly, the urban poor as well as rural migrants have always formed an identifiable element among urban developments in Mumbai. However, formerly under colonial rule their direct contact with, and influence on the city was very limited, both worlds lived in different spaces. Today, the city is clearly comprised of different worlds … but (they) are also united by their sheer physical presence in the city. But in the proposals by city authorities, there’s ‘a sense of induced dualism’ which relegates the homeless poor to the periphery.

POSTCOLONIAL SUBURBS: THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BUNGALOW

Where the previous articles address the spatial and social forms of the city, the following three speak, at least initially, to the architectural and social form of the building, not least the distinctively colonial product, the bungalow–compound complex (King 1976; 1984), and also to the suburban spatial forms its parameters help to construct. In more than five decades following Independence, how do Indian (and other) scholars see what has happened to both the idea, and reality, of the sprawling colonial bungalow, its expansive, space-consuming suburban setting, its role as a symbol of status, and, not least, its significance as a subject of scholarly investigation? The answer depends, to different degrees, on where the postcolonial bungalows are, to whom they belong (public or private) and who are occupying them.

Anita Sinha’s essays on ‘The Bungalows of Lucknow’ (1999) traces ‘continuities and changes in the Lucknow cantonment from the colonial to the postcolonial era’. She concludes that ‘the landscape retains its colonial image in large part because it is governed by the zoning regulations and bylaws of a century ago’. Despite alterations to the bungalows to meet the needs of the extended Indian families who live in some of them, she suggests that ‘the continuity of colonial imagery in the post-colonial era implies the internalization of colonial values by planners and residents of the cantonment’ (p.57).

Like other cantonments in India, that at Lucknow was a major constituent part of the ‘colonial landscape of power’ – physically manifest in its spatial separation from the indigenous city and segregation according to racial group and military rank. However, because the cantonment depended heavily on Indian manpower (for servants) and financial resources, ‘the separation was never complete’. The continuity of colonial values is largely attributed to the fact that today Lucknow cantonment forms the headquarters of the Central Command of the Indian army with almost one-third of its population consisting of army personnel. Though the names of Indian politicians and army generals name the streets and a dozen Hindu temples (also a gurdwara and mosque) have been constructed, Lucknow cantonment ‘has not seen any drastic changes in the half century since independence’ (p.57). Despite the persistence of the typical colonial social maldistribution of space, with 90 per cent of the cantonment population living on 7 per cent of the land, the two bodies responsible for the cantonment manage it according to the (colonial) Cantonment Act of 1924, their ‘conceptual framework … shaped by colonial ideas’ (p.58). Sinha quotes a senior military official: ‘bungalow area is seen as sacrosanct … land cannot be carved out of it to accommodate the civilian population of the bazaars’ (p.58). Sinha’s interviews with residents of 15 bungalows, undertaken in the 1990s, reveal interesting differences between civilian owners and army officers. While the Cantonment Board forbids modifications exceeding 10 per cent of the structure, civilian owners had adapted the bungalow’s internal space to accommodate extended family needs (in one case, rooms being divided up among seven siblings). Owing to the ever-increasing costs of servants (between 10 and 20 of whom maintained the extensive spaces of the bungalow in colonial times), maintaining the bungalows and compounds (from one to five acres in area) was a major problem. On the other hand, senior army officers and wealthy civilians kept their bungalows in good colonial style: lawns to the front, orchards at the rear, occasionally a bar for evening parties at the back, the occasional badminton court. On average, according to Sinha, each compound had 30–40 mature trees.

Sinha maintains that the colonial bungalow ‘has had a profound impact on Indian residential architecture’. It was adopted by the Indian elite in the last century and the new housing in the post-Independence era shows its influence … (even though) ‘the adoption of its form has never been total’ (p.61). She cites a study of a new residential enclave in south Delhi inhabited by retired officers of the ICS and the military as ‘a representation of colonialism in a decolonized space’. The ‘colony’ is governed by by-laws that do not permit parking and vending on its tree-lined streets. Similar middle class and upper-income developments have occurred in other Indian cities (p.62).

Interestingly, Sinha states that, in Lucknow, half a century after Independence, ‘there are no signs of a post-colonial sensibility with regard to planning the physical environment’ (p.62). Though no longer ‘overtly a symbol of the Other or representative of its cultural hegemony, the cantonment’s image ‘speaks of the past’. It ‘sustains colonial traditions of social inequalities’ previously between Europeans and Indians, now between the ‘wealthy and lower income Indians’. The future of the cantonment and its bungalows, Sinha concludes, is ‘dependent on the military’s ability to support its resource-intensive infrastructure’ (p.62).

If Sinha (as an architectural and landscape historian) highlights the larger structural, institutional,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• The Architext Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Re-theorising the city
• Chapter 1 Architecture, capital and the globalisation of culture1
• Chapter 2 Colonialism, urbanism and the capitalist world economy1
• Chapter 3 Writing colonial space: a review article1
• Chapter 4 Re-presenting world cities: cultural theory/social practice1
• Chapter 5 Postcolonialism, representation and the city1
• Chapter 6 Cities: contradictory utopias1
• Methodologies
• Chapter 7 Actually existing postcolonialisms: colonial urbanism and architecture after the postcolonial turn1
• Chapter 8 Internationalism, imperialism, postcolonialism, globalisation: framing vernacular architecture1
• Chapter 9 Postcolonial cities, postcolonial critiques1
• Chapter 10 Notes towards a global historical sociology of building types1
• Chapter 11 Imperialism and world cities1
• Chapter 12 Imperialism and the Grand Hotel: case studies of colonial modernities1
• Chapter 13 Globalisation and homogenisation: the state of play1
• Defining contemporary and historical cities
• Chapter 14 Imperial cities1
• Chapter 15 Global cities1
• Name and place index
• Subject index