The Study focuses on the social and, more especially, the cultural processes governing colonial urban development and develops a theory and methodology to do this. The author demonstrates how the physical and spatial arrangements characterizing urban development are unique products of a particular society, to be understood only in terms of its values, behaviour and institutions and the distribution of social and political power within it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in 'colonial cities' of Asia and Africa where the environmental assumptions of a dominant, industrializing Western power were introduced to largely 'pre-industrial' societies. Anthony King draws his material primarily from these areas, and includes a case study of the development of colonial Delhi from the early nineteenth century to 1947. Yet, as the author explains, the problems of how cultural social and political factors influence the nature of environments and how these in turn affect social processes and behaviour, are of global significance. This book was first published in 1976.

At once an engaging portrait of a cosmopolitan African city and an exploration of colonial irrationality, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar opens up new perspectives on the making of modernity and the metropolis.

Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are unequally confronted with social, economic and environmental challenges, particularly those related with population growth, urban sprawl, and informality. This complex and uneven African urban condition requires an open discussion of past and current urban planning practices and future reforms. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa gives a broad perspective of the history of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa and a critical view of issues, problems, challenges and opportunities confronting urban policy makers. The book examines the rich variety of planning cultures in Africa, offers a unique view on the introduction and development of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa, and makes a significant contribution against the tendency to over-generalize Africa’s urban problems and Africa’s urban planning practices. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa is written for postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates, researchers, planners and other policy makers in the multidisciplinary field of Urban Planning, in particular for those working in Spatial Planning, Architecture, Geography, and History.

This book is comprehensive both in terms of time coverage, from before the Pharaohs to the present moment and in that it tries to consider cities from the entire continent, not just Sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from factual information and rich description material culled from many sources, it looks at many issues from why urban life emerged in the first place to how present-day African cities cope in difficult times. Instead of seeing towns and cities as somehow extraneous to the real Africa, it views them as an inherent part of developing Africa, indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial and emphasizes the extent to which the future of African society and African culture will likely be played out mostly in cities. The book is written to appeal to students of history but equally to geographers, planners, sociologists and development specialists interested in urban problems.

Politics and culture are at once semi-autonomous and intertwined. Nowhere is this more revealingly illustrated than in urban design, a field that encompasses architecture and social life, traditions and modernization. Here aesthetic goals and political intentions meet, sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in conflict. Here the formal qualities of art confront the complexities of history. When urban design policies are implemented, they reveal underlying aesthetic, cultural, and political dilemmas with startling clarity. Gwendolyn Wright focuses on three French colonies--Indochina, Morocco, and Madagascar--that were the most discussed, most often photographed, and most admired showpieces of the French empire in the early twentieth century. She explores how urban policy and design fit into the French colonial policy of "association," a strategy that accepted, even encouraged, cultural differences while it promoted modern urban improvements that would foster economic development for Western investors. Wright shows how these colonial cities evolved, tracing the distinctive nature of each locale under French imperialism. She also relates these cities to the larger category of French architecture and urbanism, showing how consistently the French tried to resolve certain stylistic and policy problems they faced at home and abroad. With the advice of architects and sociologists, art historians and geographers, colonial administrators sought to exert greater control over such matters as family life and working conditions, industrial growth and cultural memory. The issues Wright confronts--the potent implications of traditional norms, cultural continuity, modernization, and radical urban experiments--still challenge us today.

In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation. In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the ‘Hong Kong story’ by tracing the emergence of its ‘speculative landscape’ from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong’s urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to examine the dynamics of ethno-national contestation and colonialism in Israel/Palestine, this book investigates the approaches for dealing with the colonial and post-colonial urban space, resituating them within the various theoretical frameworks in colonial urban studies. The book uses Henry Lefebvre¿s three constituents of space ¿ perceived, conceived and lived ¿ to analyse past and present colonial cases interactively with time. It mixes the non-temporal conceptual framework of analysis of colonialism using literature of previous colonial cases with the inter-temporal abstract Lefebvrian concepts of space to produce an inter-temporal re-reading of them. Israeli colonialism in the occupied areas of 1967, its contractions from Sinai and Gaza, and the implications on the West Bank are analysed in detail. By illustrating the transformations in colonial urban space at different temporal stages, a new phase is proposed - the trans-colonial. This provides a conceptual means to avoid the pitfalls of neo-colonial and post-colonial influences experienced in previous cases, and the book goes on to highlight the implications of such a phase on the Palestinians. It is an important contribution to studies on Middle East Politics and Urban Geography.