Postcolonial Cities

Following definitions of key terms, including ‘postcolonialism’ understood both as era and form of critique, the article focuses on postcolonial cities viewed as cities in one-time colonial societies. In examining the origins of interest in this phenomenon in geography and the social sciences, the article first discusses the concept of the colonial city from the 1950s and 1960s and its place in the critique of Euro-American urban theory at that time. Research interest in the specifically named postcolonial city emerges from an increasing recognition, following independence, of the persistence of colonial city features: social/spatial divisions between ‘European’ and ‘native’ cities, inequitable distributions of resources, affronts to national cultural identity from colonial symbolism, and the structures of political and cultural power maintaining these. The focus then moves to the growing critique of these earlier studies of the colonial city, from the late 1990s, by indigenous and other postcolonial scholars whose alternative representations address, among other issues, questions of modernity, identity, and nationalism, and the representation of postcolonial urbanism as heritage. The final section discusses the use of ‘postcolonial’ to describe the one-time imperial metropole and the relevance of a postcolonial critique to the understanding of contemporary urban cultures, economies and politics, multiculturalism and issues of globalization.