Colonial City

Definitions and Features

The words colony and culture share a common Latin stem—colere—that is, to cultivate. Colonia was the term used to indicate a public settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country where settlers, while retaining their Roman citizenship, received land and acted as a garrison for the Roman Empire. The words colony and plantation were sometimes used interchangeably. Indeed, the Colonial Office of the British Empire was originally called the Board of Plantations. In its early usage in the sixteenth century, the word plantation simply referred to settling people; however, it later came to denote a New World mode of production based on the exploitation of slave labor for the production of agricultural staples for a metropolitan market. The cities that grew out of colonization were based on social segregation and political dominance. Colonial cities served as physical expressions of dominance in which the relationships between the dominator and the [Page 166]dominated were clear, and are often characterized by the physical segregation of their ethnic, social, religious, and cultural constituencies. The terms periphery (referring to the territory that is colonized) and metropole (referring to the imperial center of power) indicate the geographically separate but ideologically related components of colonial urbanism.

Due to the asymmetry of power between the colonized and the colonizers, the colonial project may be defined as a power struggle oscillating between dominance and dependence, and often the morphological layout of the cities reflected this equation. For example, many colonial cities followed a dual-city model with sharp segregation between the urban realms of the colonizer and the colonized. French colonial cities of Morocco such as Fez, Rabat, and Casablanca were marked by the distinction between a European town and “traditional” or native city.

Colonial cities often served as the very apparatus through which domination was maintained over this subject population. Motivated by religious, cultural, or economic ideologies, colonial cities functioned as the environments through which religious or cultural conversion and economic exploitation occurred. For example, colonial cities such as Bombay, Singapore, Kingston, and Rio de Janeiro grew around the ports that serviced the surplus extraction of resources and labor from the colonies to the metropole.

Colonial cities often displayed social diversity, with various racial, cultural, and religious groups organized into a rigid stratification system. This social hierarchy was composed of a ruling elite (colonial settlers), the colonized indigenous population, and an intervening group intermediate in status and power. For example, in Calcutta, British colonists deliberately cultivated a segment of the indigenous elite, who served as intermediaries between the colonizers and the colonized. These elites often lived in grand spaces that were comparable to those of the dominant population and exercised considerable control over their urban environment.

...