First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A common assumption about cities throughout the world is tht they are essentially an elaboration of the Euro-American model. Postcolonial Urbanism demonstrates the narrowness of this vision. Cities in the postcolonial world, the book shows, are producing novel forms of urbanism not reducible to Western urbanism. Despite being heavily colonized in the past, Southeast Asia has been largely ignored in discussions about postcolonial theory and in general considerations of global urbanism. An international cast of contributors focuses on the heavily urbanized world region of Southeast Asia to investigate the novel forms of urbanism germinating in postcolonial settings such as Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Hanoi, and the Philippines. Offering a mix of theoretical perspectives and empirical accounts, Postcolonial Urbanism presents a panoramic view of the cultures, societies, and politics of the postcolonial city.

Kalyan presents a trans-disciplinary exploration of the manifold possibilities and challenges that confront a ‘globalizing’ megacity like New Delhi.

This book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism by using a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of who and what makes urban environments. Myers explores the global hierarchy of cities, the criteria for positioning within these hierarchies and the successes of various policymaking approaches designed specifically to boost a city’s ranking. Engaging heavily with postcolonial studies and Global South thinking, he shows how cities construct one another’s spaces and calls for a new understanding of planetary urbanism that moves beyond Western-centric perspectives.

This book provides a framework to rethink postcoloniality and urbanism from African perspectives. Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives on African crises through postmillennial films, the book addresses the need to situate global south cultural studies within the region. The book employs film criticism and semiotics as devices to decode contemporary cultures of African cities, with a specific focus on crisis. Drawing on a variety of contemporary theories on cities of the global south, especially Africa, the book sifts through nuances of crisis urbanism within postmillennial African films. In doing so the book offers unique perspectives that move beyond the confines of sociological or anthropological studies of cities. It argues that crisis has become a mainstay reality of African cities and thus occupies a central place in the way these cities may be theorized or imagined. The book considers crises of six African cities: nonentity in post-apartheid Johannesburg, laissez faire economies of Kinshasa, urban commons in Nairobi, hustlers in postwar Monrovia, latent revolt in Cairo, and cantonments in postwar Luanda, which offer useful insights on African cities today. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.

The book focuses on contemporary African cities, caught in the contradiction of an imperial past and postcolonial present. The essays explore the cultural role of colonial architecture and urbanism in the production of meanings: in the inscription of power and discipline, as well as in the dynamic construction of identities. It is in these new dense urban spaces, with all their contradictions, that urban Africans are reworking their local identities, building families, and creating autonomous communities – made fragile by neo-liberal states in a globalizing world. The book offers a range of scholarly interpretations of the new forms of urbanity. It engages with issues, themes and topics including colonial legacies, postcolonial intersections, cosmopolitan spaces, urban reconfigurations, and migration which are at the heart of the continuing debate about the trajectory of contemporary African cities. The collection discusses contemporary African cities as diverse as Dar Es Salaam, Dakar, Johannesburg, Lagos and Kinshasa – offering new insights into the current state of postcolonial African cities. This was previously published as a special issue of African Identities.

This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.