![]()
1 Colonial urban space
Interest in the issue of colonial urban space has developed over the past three or four decades. This theme was addressed by many scholars such as Anthony King, who in reflecting on Delhi proposed three variables concerning colonial urban development: culture, technology and power structure of colonialism.1 Other scholars have addressed colonial and post-colonial urban development through the analyses of different case studies in the world. While Stephan Legg builds on Michel Foucault's analyses of discourse to analyse the colonial case of Delhi, he stresses on colonial governmentalities within the sovereign power, biopolitical improvement and the function of Delhi as a national and international node.2 In his study in urban history Spiro Kostof has focused on the urban form with all the historical processes and meanings they represent and has provided important analyses on cultural contexts behind the creation of colonial cities.3 Zeynep Celik adopted a historical perspective of urban form and urban processes to identify their impact on culture and identity.4 Mohamed Osmani gives an overview of various colonial cities from a sociological approach.5 Brenda Yeoh has discussed how Singapore as a space of control and resistance was made visible and governable through negotiation of power between municipal authorities and the Asian communities, in shaping physical, disciplinary and biopolitical spatial formations.6 Legg, Kostof, Celik, Osmani and Yeoh provide different examples of various approaches to analyze colonial cases. However, this book attempts to provide a means to tie the analyses with the other phases of colonialism in one coherent and continued analysis. Bill Ashcroft criticizes the common strategy of the post-colonial and relates this to the misconception between culture and identity.7 He suggests a post-colonial policy of Interpolation, as a process of insertion, interruption, interjection, as an initial movement in the process of post-colonial transformation. Jyoti Hosagrahar investigates the case of colonial and post-colonial Delhi and acknowledges the discourses of modernity showing the formal contradictions and the absence of coherence in the indigenous modernities presented in urban spaces.8 Jane Jacobs investigates the space of the city and analyses post-colonialism and its relation with colonialism as well as the relation between global and local.9 She provides a productive encounter between new theorizations of imperialism and post-colonialism, and illustrates how grand ideas of empire may become unstable technologies of power. Nihal Perera illustrates the hybridity and mimicry in Sri Lanka while investigating the extent of ‘indigenization’ in the post-colonial phase, a term he interprets as a form of social and spatial assimilation and resistance.10 Other authors who analysed both theoretical and specific cases on colonial urban development in various phases include Nezzar Al Sayyad,11 Carole Rakodi,12 and Abidin Kusno.13 While the above, and numerous other authors,14 have provided a rich and diverse array of analysis and possibilities of various phases of colonialism, this book attempts to combine a sustained and systematic analysis of colonialism and post-colonialism with a discussion of the dynamics of changes and transformations to current colonial cases by using the medium of space.
Henry Lefebvre and The Production of Space
The issue of Space has been dealt by several researchers who have given different interpretations depending on their realm of thought and conceptual variation. The concepts of space range between different levels and scales: from ideas giving space more weight on how it influences people (i.e. space is the medium that is shaping the lives of people), to ideas considering that space is simply a representation of their social lives. Conceptualization of space is important because it influences the direction of analyses. Zygmunt Bauman,15 in his discussion on Modernity, explains that physical space is derived from the ‘phenomenological reduction of daily experience to pure quantity, during which distance is ‘depopulated‘ and ‘extemporalized‘‘, while pure space is but an abstraction, freed of ‘content relative to time and circumstance’, deriving from ‘social space’ (from our relations with others).16 Ernst Cassirer makes a distinction between three types of spaces related to the modes of human spatial experience.17 The first is organic space related to the biological and physical experience with spatial forms; the second is perceptual space, in how humans process this experience and register it in the world of thought; and the third is the symbolic space which is related to the abstract form of interpretation such as architectural forms.18 Suzanne Langer19 differentiates between ‘real’ space which is created and physically experienced by forms or colours, and ‘virtual’ space which is the effect and impression on humans in visualizing the ‘real’ space.20 David Harvey criticizes the conception of space by arguing that it is dependent on the circumstances and on how different human practices use different conceptions of space.21 He states that:
space is neither absolute, relative or relational in itself, but it can become one or all simultaneously depending on the circumstances. The problem of the proper conceptualization of space is resolved through human practice with respect to it. In other words, there are no philosophical answers to philosophical questions that arise over the nature of space – the answers lie in human practice. The question ‘what is space?’ is therefore replaced by the questions ‘how is it that different human practices create and make use of different conceptualizations of space?22
While these synopsis of space and also others provide important interpretation of the meaning and relation between space and people, this study is based on the conception of space as defined by Henry Lefebvre.23 With space raised as the central argument, its organization as a material product, with the relationship between social and spatial structures of urbanism, and with the ideological content of socially created space,24 he illustrates the importance of both space and time rather than preferring time over space, showing the competition over the production of space for domination,25 and the centrality of space in the political struggle in the contemporary world,26 thus giving a new dimension not only to contemporary urban policy, but to theory in general. Lefebvre’s analysis is related to scale, proportion, dimension and level; it is structured in a way that takes into consideration the relation between the whole and the parts, the abstract and the concrete, the local and the global, the self and the society, and between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’. It complements other kinds of analyses as it introduces other specific categories into discussion.27
Despite the relatively recent appearance of some of his books in English, his work had a wide interest by various scholars from different specializations. A large number of articles and books have been devoted specifically to his work, giving reviews, explanations, interpretations and further elaborations to many of the important issues he wrote about, in addition to the use of his work as a theoretical tool to re-interpret various existing political, social or urban phenomena. Since the 1970s, his work has influenced a wide range of theoretical and political projects. Based on his work, many of the publications discussed issues related to urban spatiality, urban theory, socio-spatial theory, conditions of postmodernity, the body and sexuality, everyday life, the production of scale, urban struggles, the transformation of urban citizenship and many others.28 Several books were concerned with his philosophical concepts and their relation with other philosophers like Lacan, Heidegger, Bergson or Fanon.29 Other interests in the work of Lefebvre concentrate on specific concepts he developed such as rhythm-analysis and everyday life. His book The Production of Space had a wide interest for urban theorists and geographers, and was used for the interpretation of political and spatial struggles, and the politics and planning of urban space in different dimensions and levels. Many have also built their work on the concepts of production of space. Such an approach includes the writings of David Harvey (1989), Edward Soja (1996), J. Smith (2000) and M. Whitehead (2003), just to name a few.30
By combining literature of previous colonial cases with literature about Lefebvre’s theory of production of space, this chapter attempts to construct a theoretical framework for analysing colonial and post-colonial urban space. Thus variables that affect the dynamics of urban space are extracted by linking the abstract concepts of space with the means of the distinct spatial configurations of previous colonial cases. These represent the contested relation between the colonizer and the colonized on space and in the different periods of time. The importance of this is to level the analyses of colonial urban space in a dynamic interaction with time, rather than from a fixed point in time. It is suggested in this study that this interactive level with time can be useful in analysing the colonial urban space of cases still in the colonization phase and then to project the effects into a post-colonial context, thus providing generic colonial patterns that can be used to analyse colonial situations whether they happened in the past, or are still happening in the present and whether they are in the colonial or post-colonial phase.
Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, which is used in this research as the basis for the conceptualization of colonial urban space, is considered by many as the most important of his books. Part of its strength stems from the ability of Lefebvre to integrate different disciplines and concepts, represented in an intellectually theoretical argumentation. He combined his philosophical, social and political approaches with an application of these on the interactive relation between the human senses and the geographical territory. This resulted in the presentation of theory and practice of the politics of space that could be used as a strong tool for applications to understand the dynamics of political struggle in different settings, and temporal phases.
The two main terms in the title of Lefebvre’s book ‘production’ and ‘space’ are complex and have multi-level meanings discussed all through his book. The use of the term ‘production’ signifies the role of humans and their various interactive forces in shaping and interacting with ‘space’, thus presenting a changeable setting based on the human intervention whether with or without an intention to do so.31 This itself includes both the material and mental aspects, not only to produce things in space, but to produce space itself.32 In referring to the book as a project he illustrates that the production of space is constructed from both conceptual and material spheres, and is ‘both abstract and concrete in character’, until it expresses itself and comes into practice.33 It is not used for the analysis only but is a major element of the analysis itself, and is produced as a material, social and mental construction.34 It participates in the same concrete-abstract tension as a commodity; thus it is a rich dialectical medium with both thing and process features.35 In this sense, space is produced as being a condition as well as an action, where excluding one gives an incomplete reality. This deep analysis of space provides a rich foundation to reinterpret the political, social and physical environment. Lefebvre introduces a conceptual triad of spatial theory, including the spatial practice (perceived space); representations of space (conceived space); and spaces of representation (lived space), where lived space depends on both the mental and physical constructs of space. The perceived space embraces the production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation, thus it is how a society secretes its space and produces it slowly. The conceived space is tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose. And the lived space embodies complex images and symbolisms, and is directly linked to ‘users’ and ‘inhabitants’ who seek to change and appropriate it through everyday social life.36 Stuart Elden explains that the application of the three-way dialectic to space owes much not only to Nietzsche but also to Heidegger, particularly in the notion of the ‘lived’ combination of the ‘perceived’ and ‘conceived’.37
Lefebvre aimed for a theory of combining these scattered and compartmented interventions, thus, the physical, mental and social aspects of space are combined to explain the impact of production of space. This places emphasis not only on the existing physical space and the interaction with senses on this space (social space), but also on the perceptions and the imaginations.38 This in itself gave a new perspective of how to understand and analyze space. The more the compartments of categories of space are interactively combined in a dialectical way, the more there is an understanding of the creation or a production of space. Thus, production has a wider range of interpretation than the mere Marxist economic sense, but includes the production of society, knowledge and institutions.39 This does not only affect things in space and space itself, but also the interactive relation of humans with and in this space. The spatial, social and political aspects are simultaneously impacting space as a component of the relations of production.40
Starting his life with an active involvement with political movements, and developing his discussion by the uncovering of the inequalities of political struggles and conflicts, and their rel...
