INTERROGATING DIFFERENCE 71 nterrogating Difference: stcolonial Perspectives in rchitecture and Urbanism INTRODUCTION Postcolonial perspectives in architecture and urbanism offer ways of thinking about built form and space as cultural landscapes that are at once globally interconnected and precisely situated in space and time. With intellectual roots in the struggles against Western European colonization of Asia and Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the scholarship has focused on the global South that has been disdained or marginalized in received literature. Postcolonial thought questions the dominance of universalizing paradigms and simplistic categorizations in conventional scholarship in architecture and urbanism focused on Western Europe and North America. Dichotomies such as those between West and non-West, traditional and modern, have persisted as rigid oppositions that deny both the interdependence and die inequalities in the relationship. Postcolonial perspectives challenge the notion of a universal modernism that privileges those in positions of power and authority, legitimating their right to define fundamental J y o t i Hosagrahar values, policies, operations, and identities They acknowledge instead the multiple-dimensions of subordinate experiences. In so doing, postcolonial perspectives particularize universal narratives and globalize narrowly parochial ones. Postcolonial scholarship began in the 1950s as a fiercely political opposil m c colonial rule: giving voice to the oppressed.: ■ while exposing the violence and brutality of those in power. Scathing indictments against -oppression critiqued the complex and r-. • 1 ■— ous ways in which colonialism operated and the corrosive impacts it had on people and their landscapes - producing a condition ■-that the French anthropologist, Georges Balandier spoke of as 'the Colonial Situation' . (1966 [1955]). Although a crude and \ i -Ici.L assertion of control over passive subjei : ; s been all too prevalent in colonial circumstances, = postcolonial scholars have recognized power as a complex and all-encompassing web of relationships that operates in space to control': people's behavior, relationships, and identities. As Ashis Nandy (1988 [1983J) has-:: explained so well, the historical inequalities. ind cultural domination have been such that the indiaenous identity must contend with its subjectification as its 'intimate enemy.' The intellectual discourse of postcolonial critique and affirmation extended from the social sciences to philosophy, film, and other art forms. Using the language, tools, and tropes of the colonizers to highlight experiences and perspectives other than the dominant ones, the subordinate and the marginalized spoke back to power, and in the process, decentred their discourse. Thus postcolonial thought as an intellectual perspective is not so much the result of a chronological sequence of events after colonialism « as it is a way of thinking about the relationship between a dominant power and its sub-:' jects under colonialism. .Postcolonial perspectives in architecture and urbanism do not form a well-defined body of knowledge or a fixed set of stylistic tropes even today. While historical, geographical, and cultural distinctions are paramount, the influences come from a variety of disciplines as well. It is. as yet, a dynamic . approach that does not have a clear or agreed upon beginning, boundary, or path. Some scholars define postcolonial studies as precisely focused on European colonization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Others have a wider view that now includes the experiences of nations that have never been colonized, such as Turkey; the repercussions of earlier colonization in Latin America; recent imperialism such as those by the US. Japan, or the USSR; as well as the multiple effects of colonial experiences on Europe and the US. In its broadest definition, post-colonial perspectives give voice to all types and sites of struggles against hegemonic power. Its challenge is in legitimizing, enabling, and empowering alternative narratives and forms. Many critical readings about domination based on gender, race, caste, ethnic, or religious groups, could thus be subsumed under postcolonial thought. In this chapter, I adopt a middle ground. I argue for an intellectual decolonization. an active rejection of spaces and discourses based in hegemonic dualities; a realm that is neither so broad as to include every type of critical perspective under its umbrella nor so narrow as to exclude any interpretations that do not pertain specifically to Western European colonialism. Through writing and theorizing, but equally through design and planning interventions, postcolonial theory has relocated discussions of modernity to marginalized locales and emphasized the interplay of culture and power in imagining, producing, and experiencing the built environment. This chapter considers writing within the broad realm of postcolonial perspectives as well as critical practices with similar objectives. I also include the work of scholars from a variety of fields other than architecture who have influenced thinking about built form and space. A wealth of scholarship has emerged in recent years that highlights the distinctive experiences and histories of specific regions. Given my personal experience, research, and practice, this chapter emphasizes scholarship and examples from South Asia more than other regions. It begins with a discussion of the key intellectual issues and concerns of postcolonial theory. 1 will then focus on four topics of critical importance: historiography and representation, nationalism and nationhood; globalization; and preservation and cultural identity. This leads to a discussion of postcolonial themes in recent design practice, seen across a broad geographical and cultural terrain. At a time when sustainability is an urgent global concern, postcolonial theory becomes especially important in giving salience to the global-local interconnections to address equity, access, and environmental resources. KEY IDEAS AND INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE The first and still most admired writer in this field was the philosopher and revolutionary, THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY INTERROGATING DIFFERENCE Frantz Fanon best known for his book. The Wretched of the Earth (2004 [1961]). Fanon, born in Martinique and educated in Paris, was a vocal critic of France's colonization of Algeria while it was still a colony. He denounced the psychopathology of colonialism and warned of possible violence in the aftermath of national independence struggles. Fanon's powerful work on race and colonialism inspired and influenced anti-colonial liberation movements for decades. Edward Said's Orientalism (197S) was a seminal work that further shaped the landscape of postcolonial thought. His brilliant literary exegesis of learned Orientalist scholars shows how they created the very idea of the mysterious 'Orient'. They disdained all indigenous scholars as inevitably biased and parochial; bestowing interpretive authority of major historical texts to outside experts. Said contended that this axis of knowledge and power still affects every realm of modern life across the world. Along with other scholars, Said's work showed how identities were culturally constructed rather than inherent characteristics. Said thus led the way for later critical theorists to read architecture and urban spaces, both historical and contemporary, as cultural documents that could reveal hidden biases. In Said's work, as well as in that of many other postcolonial thinkers, Michel Foucault emerged as an important theoretical influence. Foucault challenged established notions about the relationship between culture, power, and knowledge (see also Chapters 1 and 2). His 'networks of power' identified cultural practices that served to dominate in ways that went far beyond direct acts of physical aggression including architectural spaces that worked as 'machines for the control of the self". His analysis of the all-encompassing panoptic controls of prisons and asylums as well as his notion of heterotopias as 'other' spaces that allowed people to step briefly outside the expected norms of behaviour were concepts especially important to architecture (Foucault 1977: 2008). The 1980s saw revisionist thinking in the humanities and social sciences that included a growing coterie of non-Western intellectuals, many of whom had been trained in mii-:. versities in the West. The Subaltern Studies Collective, started in the mid-1980s, marked:.'. a dramatic move into the global intellectual terrain. Speaking from and on particular landscapes of South Asia, they challenged ■ conventional histories of colonized or subject populations with 'histories from hi low that presented various non-elite populations" as active agents of social and economic change.1 Ranajit Guha. Oyan Pandey. 'V il Chatterjee, Gyan Prakash, and Gayatri Spivak have been among the most prominent members of the Collective (Gtiha and Spivalc 1988; Gtiba 1997). Strongly influem Marx and Gramsci, the work of this gioup has sought out the experiences of marginalized people. The significance of their work to architecture and urbanism has been twoluld First in legitimizing "other" histories that are non-Eurocentric and making visible _ .' ■: c and landscapes that received accounts had been blind to: and second in recognizing the subtle ways in which even the most marginalized populations actively shape and negotiate the spaces they inhabit. Race was a central aspect of Western ; Europe's colonization of Asia and Africa, making racial difference an import.inr aspect of postcolonial analysis. Focusi 11 questions of power and identity, scholars have probed the positive and negative self-conceptions of diverse groups within a larger ■■ and/or hostile society (Appiah and Gates 1995; Hall and du Gay 1996). Literary cnlics like Henry Louis Gates (2006) have pointed out the cultural prejudices inherent in literary theory, arguing that black American.. literature should be evaluated on the cutetia of its origin rather than measured against -Eurocentric literary canon. Contrary So such a view of a black cultural aesthetic has been Kwame Anthony Appiah's (2003) critique of Afrocentrism as a mirror image of Eurocentrism and equally preoccupied i'i' ancient histories. These varied commentaries on the constructions of black culture African-ness have had a profound impact on -4 identity politics. For architecture and urbun- cnch debates have raised questions ism. s ,l" . , ' , about subjective experience and cultural relativity of aesthetics in architecture and urbanism as opposed to supposedly objective and : universal measures for their evaluation. Colonial anxieties about purity of oppositional categories such as black and white, colonizer and colonized, modern and traditional were countered by ever increasing forms of hybridity as new ideas, people, images, and capital moved around the world with sreater frequency. Transnattonafism and itttercorihectedness meant increasingly 'impure' mixtures of diverse, supposedly contradictory, even forbidden elements, or experimentation driven by the desire to find new kinds of strength and beauty. Homi Bhabha (1994) has recognized the unpredictability of hybridization, the impossibility of total con- : trol as itself a source of power. Bhabha's intricate view of hybridity and infiltration of cultural symbols, values, and practices and his emphasis on identities as heterogeneous -provide an understanding of multiple, contradictory, and fluid modern identities. The grand history of Europe had for decades been equated with the universal history of humankind and many have continued to .accept accounts of a linear and universal modern originating from Western Europe and disseminating to other places. Postcolonial intellectuals have been instrumental in offering complex readings of modernity and modernism from the margins. Arjun Appadurai (1996) has been immensely influential with his work on modernity and globalization (discussed in greater detail later in this chapter). In his recent book. Provincializing -Europe (2007), Dipesh Chakrabarty has addressed the idea of Europe not as a specific geographical region but as the mythical site of the original modern. His effort to provincialize Europe is not to reject the legacy of Enlightenment thought that he considers indispensable to a social critique of justice Md equity but to de-centre the mythical Europe by looking at the many Europes from the margins. Addressing global interconnections, local experience, and visual difference, postcolonial approaches in architecture and urbanism look far beyond form, function, and style. In depicting particular places as international and cosmopolitan as well as local and provincial, postcolonial critics do nol dismiss the commonalities of modernism but have highlighted the uneasy negotiation between sameness and difference in particular locales. Postcolonial theory has informed thinking about buildings and urban space as symbolic cultural landscapes that are historically constituted, culturally constructed, political artifacts whose forms are dynamic and meanings constantly negotiated. HISTORIOGRAPHY AND REPRESENTATION From Vitruvius to Venturi, architectural theory has relied on a particular set of historical premises and examples that were considered universal even though they were rooted in the experiences and intellectual traditions of Western Europe and North America. This Eurocentric canon looked down on all other cultures, dismissing their architecture as static, backward, or 'decadent'. Postcolonial thought questions the received canon of European architectural history as the only history of architecture and is also critical of a linear history that traces the 'progress' of architecture from primitive to modern. One genre of writing has critiqued the ways that design and policy reinforced established identities and relationships of power and also looked at interventions in the colonies. In The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991), Gwendolyn Wright has analysed design strategies in France and in three French colonies (Morocco, Indochina, and Madagascar) from the I8S0s through to the 1930s. Seemingly antagonistic design strategies - historic preservation, contextual design, and a highly rationalized modernism - all served imperial goals. 74 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY INTERROGATING DIFFERENCE 75 Highlighting the overarching and particular histories of different colonies, she has also emphasized the significance of this imagery aL home to promote tourism and public support for the colonialist project. In An Imperial Vision (1989), Thomas Metcalfhas looked at architecture as a symbolic representation of British power in India and as an instrument for articulating cultural difference. Another genre of postcolonial inquiry has focused on the conflicts, negotiations, and experiences of different groups of subordinate populations in response to dominant interventions to control and define identities. Historiography in this mode of inquiry has used eclectic sources to piece together narratives from the other side. For instance, my study of nineteenth century Delhi (Hosagrahar 2005) showed that Indians appropriated neoclassical elements into traditional building fronts, negotiated the limits of Haussman-ic clearances of dense urban neighborhoods, and subverted colonial building regulations to transform the city into one that was both traditional and modern. Accounts of defiance and negotiation by those in the margins destabilize the singular authority of those in power. Through form, use, and meaning, architecture and built form have contributed to imagining and constructing identities. Some scholars have critically examined the ways that those in authority have used space to define oppositional identities to reinforce their position of power. Others have explored the ways these enforced and essentialized identities have been contested and negotiated by subordinate groups. Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt (19S8), a seminal work, critically examines Europe's encounter with the Orient, the preconceptions and perceptions on both sides. In his insightful analysis of the representation of Cairo at the World's Fair in Paris in .1889, Mitchell has argued that colonial displays affected Western perceptions of urban life, especially in the colonies, creating an artificial vantage ('the-world-as-exhibition') that combined sensual pleasures with the assurance of safety. Zeynep Celik (1992) later accentuated the gendered aspect i these displays of the non-West that furthe reinforced power relations between the colonizers and the colonized. The colonial construction of diffr u was premised on the purity of the opposing groups: colonizer and colonized. Orient and Occident, modern and traditional. The reality, however, was always much muddier Some postcolonial histories have rex this ideal of purity to look at hybrids. Anthony ■ King (1976) initiated this approach early in his career, analyzing British cantonmeni India as a hybrid 'third culture': neither entirely British nor entirely indigene i • subsequent book, The Bungalow (1984) 1<>I- • lowed the development of a house form Ironi its humble origins as rural hut in Bi through its many colonial avatars in Si and Southeast Asia to its incarnation 'cozy' middle-class house in the United i This book showed architecture as a j project in which the buildings and forn developed in one place influenced tho: another, weaving as it did themes of preju- j dice and exoticism, visibility and invisi -i into a complex narrative. Other recent s have also regarded the seemingly dichi mous categories such as 'colonizer' 'colonized', or 'modem' and 'traditional' fluid and shifting, seeking out areas hybridity, ambivalence, and crossing ov cultures. In emphasizing interconnei and infiltrations, they have highlights '.' active engagement of the subordinate gro in the making of their landscapes and i< ties. Swati Chattopadhyay's (2005) inh tation of colonial Calcutta, for example, offered valuable insights into the way the ',. Bengali middle-class appropriated the I firms and tropes of the colonizer to increase their own authority and status. Against the notion of a singular Wesi modernity imposed on the world, schi ■! -i ■ increasingly advocate the concept of multiple, overlapping, and incomplete modernj- .:■ ties. This in turn precludes simj. characterization of forms and meanings I for instance Morton 2000). Postcoloi thought is not about a rejection of European modernism. Rather, it necessarily engages with modernist universal and the discourses of European intellectual traditions. Acknowledging these as a global heritage, postcolonial perspectives make sense of this {jeritaae from and for the margins. Postcolonial theories have created modulated terms to describe the multiplicities of modern life and. to a lesser extent, its hierarchies. Dilip parameshwar Gaonkar (1999) speaks of "alternative modernities,' and Gyan Prakash 1(999) of 'divided modernities.' Lu in this volume (Chapter 13) underscores complex, impure interconnections with 'entangled modernities.' Such phrases challenge the received canon that puts Europe at the centre, 'rejecting adaptations and secondary gestures toward niulticulturalism or 'global openness'. In fact, all modernities are indigenized interpretations of an imagined ideal. This is >why I titled my book Indigenous Modernities f(Hosagrahar 2005). Rejecting the notion of an alternative to the dominant and single notion df'rnodern, I hold that all modernities tire indigenized interpretations of an imagined ideal. The concept of 'indigenous modemi-j ties' recognizes and legitimizes a multiplicity iof 'other experiences of modern life, its spa-tklforms and cultural expressions, as being on a par with conventional ones. And Western ;Europe moderns too, are localized indigenous realizations of a mythical ideal. Postcolonial perspectives not only globalize local histories and provincialize histo-:ries::masquerading as global but have also informed global comparisons. For those convinced that particular European architectural histories are the only histories of architec-iture, the canonized built forms are, by definition, complete, autonomous, and universal. In this view, the built forms of other places, especially in the colonies and ex-colonies, are dependent and place specific and hence not worthy subjects of historical inquiry. Nineteenth-century European historians presumed they were presenting a global perspective. V.\?\: today, few European or American historians pause to ask how colonial histories might have affected Western aesthetic ideals and hierarchies. Early histories of modern architecture, notably Sigfried Giedion's Space, Tune and Architecture (1967 [1941]) glorified a teleology that showed modernism emerging triumphant from western architectural history. Giedion gave considerable attention to the US as well as Europe, but virtually ignored non-Western cultures. Later editions, and a plethora of similar histories of modernism that soon followed, occasionally added non-Western sites designed by European and North American 'masters'. Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash offer a valuable counterpoint to the architectural histories of Bannister Fletcher and Giedeon in A Global History of Architecture (Ching et al. 2006). In order to emphasize the connections, contrasts, and influences in architectural movements throughout history, this book organizes 5000 years of architectural history on a global timeline from pre-history to the present. Postcolonial perspectives, however, have not yet managed to dominate the teaching of architectural history, as became clear from a special series of issues of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2002-2003). The series highlighted how the primacy of European monuments and narrative of stylistic development still remains the central architectural canon almost everywhere. It was also apparent that local architectural histories and building traditions received short shrift in comparison. Sibel Bozdogan (2001), Gulsum Baydar (1998), and I (Hosagrahar 2002) have each pointed otit the Orientalist bias in the canonical histories of architecture. In recent years, 'non-Western' intellectuals teaching in architecture schools in North America and Australia (many of whose writings are discussed in this chapter) have brought postcolonial critique and transformations to bear on the teaching of grand European histories of architecture -so it is well possible that the coming years will see a serious shift in dominant teaching topics and methods. 76 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY INTERROGATING DIFFERENCE 77 NATIONALISM AND NATIONS The emergence of nations in the twentieth century has been a matter of much debate among scholars (see also Chapters 11 and 12). The works of Benedict Anderson (1999 [1985]) and Partha Chatterjee (1993) have led the way. Anderson described how nations were 'imagined' into existence rather than tefeologically determined by language or religion. Chatterjee has pointed out how nations were cobbled together from colonies and imagined into existence by colonizers in their efforts at empire building and later by nationalists. Military conquest and European geopolitical competition shaped national boundaries regardless of the diversity of indigenous groups they encompassed, creating among citizens fragmented loyalties between modern nations and other forms of traditional communities. Architectural styles had historically played an instrumental role in visualizing national identities in Western Europe. For the Western European colonizers building in the colonies, the choice of style was deliberate. In addition to displaying the authority of the empire, they carefully sought to construct narratives of difference between what they saw as the enlightened colonizers and the primitive, decadent, and despotic colonized. The newly independent nations also used architecture in their search for a national identity in their own terms. They rebelled against a colonial characterization of their societies as primitive and backward, and at the same time did not want to cast themselves in the mould of the colonizers whose forms they identified with oppression. The literature suggests that the anxiety to visually express the identity of the new nation as both modern and unique in its heritage resulted in four types of responses. First, the rise of anti-imperialist movements during the twentieth century often fuelled the idea of reclaiming (or constructing) a pristine and idealized precolonial past rejecting architectural forms associated with Western Europe and Greek and Roman classicism. For instance, in her study of modern nation building in Turkey and its complicated rcL. tionship with an Ottoman past, SibeL Bozdogan (2001) has showed how the architects such as Sedad Eldem served as I.-, ! figures in the new republic responsible for '! creating a 'Turkish' identity that made references to a vernacular Anatolian heritage. : A second response has been for the nation lu ! portray itself as a global modern by invito ,i j acknowledged 'masters' of modern architi ■ j ture in Western Europe and North America to ■ [ construct iconic symbols in the International Style such as in Chandigarh and Dacca. I Vikramaditya Prakash's (2002) critical stu ii- 1 of Le Corbusier's design of Chandigarh j has explicated a newly independent India's struggle to define itself as a leader in science • and technology. He has shown tire ways i u | conflicting views and imaginations of krv I figures, political ideologies, and urban . processes were negotiated to construct the J modernist narrative of the nation and shape ■-the seemingly global form of the city. A th.i.i g response has been more fragmented, j Changing nationalist agendas and narratr. us 1 can lead to a diversity of architectural and . urban preferences, that each mediate in a I different way the construction of national j identity (see for instance Kusno 2000 about j Indonesia). Finally, in recent years, design 1 interventions by high profile designers from j Western Europe and North America in place, that had hitherto been relegated as tra-l'-tional have helped to establish their nation! I identity as significant players in a globalized j world. Architects recognized as global st u. ■' have moved 'the margins' to transform them 1 into museums of architectural wonder or 1 laboratories for architectural experimen. ". tion. Iconic buildings such as those by Hur/ng andde Meuron and Rem Koolhaas in Beijii-j,-Norman Foster's design for the sustainable g city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi, and Arup's technological and planning wonder in I ie eco-city of Dongtan in China are examples of such projects that have been instrumental ,i. building new identities for these nations. Citizenship is a concept related integrally to nationhood - loyalty and allegiance to i.i '■■fmaHned community in return for the rights of legitimate membership. Going far beyond received notions of modern nation-slates as trie principal domain of citizenship, scholars have examined the complexity of citizenship and multiple allegiances in the context of transnational migration, recent trends in glo-balization as well as the growing importance of cities. Essays in a collection edited by *• James Holston, Cities and Citizenship (1999), Have pointed to the crucial significance of the right to.reside in the renegotiating of cities, democracy, and new alignments of local and global identity. The absence of citizenship or "trie systematic denial of it to some people ■significantly marginalizes them. From refugee camps and shelters of those fleeing war and ethnic persecution to the vast landscapes of slums, scholars have highlighted the urban spaces of illegitimacy, appropriation, and informality where the hegemony of their : marginal identities are reproduced and congested (Roy and Al Sayyad 2004). PRESERVATION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY As visualizations of inherited values and histories, preservation of cultural heritage i takes centre stage in discussion of identity (see also. Chapter 17). Western European notions of preservation, when transported to ■ the colonies, rationalized the assertion of -power and a single linear historical account that reinforced colonial hierarchies. Colonial officials appropriated the right to :;classify heritage structures and define which monuments were worthy of preservation as artistic representations of a people and their identity. The British in India glorified ancient history as part of a narrative of early glory and medieval decline justifying British imperialism that promised to guide India once again to the glory that was (Hosagrahar 2002). For the French in North Africa, preservation of the nwdina of cities like Rabat. Fez, ■and Tunis, frozen and timeless, juxtaposed against modernist urban improvements in the new developments outside the walled city, articulated the identity of one as a place of decadence and the other us one of progress (Beguin et al. 19S3: Abu-Lughod 1980: Wright 1991:Hamadeh 1992). For modernists seeking the comforting binary of traditional and modern, an imagined 'authenticity' is of central concern. Any signs of modernity in heritage places they dismiss as signs of 'failure*, 'incompleteness', and 'in-authenticity'. Such pictorializing of heritage and tradition to give it visual appeal has often been at the cost of locals compromising their needs and even excluding residents from inhabiting and using certain parts of the city. The process of constructing exotic and picturesque heritage has. at times, falsified a place. Not only does it disallow modernization and change but it also selectively preserves or reconstructs those elements that enhance an image of the place as belonging to another epoch. Perhaps nowhere has the process of constructing a medieval city been a more insidious and deliberate a project than in Cairo. As the authors of Making Cairo Medieval (Al Sayyad et al. 2005) have observed, art historians, architects, urban planners, conservationists, literary writers, and travellers together constructed an identity of the old city of Cairo as 'medieval'. The process involved selective restoration and rehabilitation to shape the city forms to fit the imagined ideal: a dual operation that simultaneously modernized and medievalized Cairo. Remaking Cairo as medieval served both the Western European powers that partially colonized Egypt as well as nationalist goals. Tourism has been an important driver for commodifying and marketing heritage. Selectively preserving, reconstructing, and controlling activities have served to make historic settings exotic and picturesque in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, raising the question, as the collection Consuming Tradition (Al Sayyad 2001) does, of who decides what kind of change is acceptable in historic landscapes. Falsification and 78 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY m mi INTERROGATING DIFFERENCE exaggeration in pictorializing heritage places are equally prevalent in North America where Michael Sorkin (1996) has pointed out that they are comparable to theme parks for entertainment, A discussion of heritage sites raises important questions of what gets designated as heritage, by whom, and which identities are privileged. The designation of architecturally unremarkable places as important landmarks in specific histories and communities recognizes subordinate histories. Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius was inscribed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2006. It was the landing place during much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century for almost half a million indentured labourers arriving from India to work in the sugar plantations of Mauritius, or other places in the British Empire. As such, it has strong associations in the memories of the indentured labourers and their families. Transnational populations in historic cities, like North Africans in Paris, or South Asians in Leicester, prompted in part by the intertwined histories of the two regions, have necessitated the rethinking of a single authentic identity of a place to become instead an ongoing historical account. One aspect of preservation that remains a dilemma for many cities in Asia. Africa, and Latin America, is the absence of clear distinctions between traditional built forms and informal ones. While officials intervene to preserve vernacular settlements identified as traditional; informal settlements have often been the target of clearances. Although many have observed continuities of settlement patterns between neighborhoods in historic cities and squatter settlements, the latter have been considered as urban problems and planning failures. GLOBALIZATION From a postcolonial perspective, globalization does not appear as a determining force that has flattened out other urban processes, but rather as a phenomenon producing flows of capital, goods, labour, and informations that forcefully shape the forms of specific ^ cities and neighbourhoods and Iea\es others behind, reproducing in new ways the globall inequalities and dependencies of colonial- j ism. Anthony King (1990) was one of the: earliest to make connections between mod-l ernizalion, the continuing interdependencies-i between the ex-colonial powers of Western j Europe and the colonies in Asia and Africa, i and the formation of global cities, cultures,'! and spaces. King began by tracing the con- } nections between urbanism. colonialism, and j the world economy further* developing f Wallerstein's theories of the worid-ecotiornicq system. King emphasized cultural and spatial 1 dimensions, showing how contemporary^ patterns of globalization have historical roots I in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century | colonialism of Asia and Africa. Thus, cities 1 like London, New York, and Tokyo have | become internationalized spatially and demo- { graphically as well as economically with J ethnic enclaves, transnational communities,.! and spaces of global culture (King 2004). Arjnn Appadurai's work (1996: 20011 has If been immensely influential in the under- | standing of the cultural experience of moder- | nity and globalization. Two aspects of his | work have been key. First is his engagement f| with image, media, and representation as | social practices in the global cultural proc- 1 esses that highlight the role of fantasy in -f the making of the new global order. Hejj has alerted us to the ways that the imaginär- j ies collapse accepted separations between j subject and object, resonating with the post- | modernist view of the fragmented visual |j experience. Second, is Appadurai's contribution, along with Carol Breckenridge and the j) journal, Public Culture they co-founded, to :£i understanding transnationalism and public >| culture. Together, they have been incredibly jj important in bringing to the fore cultural jj transformations in cities through investiga- ii| lions of a wide range of everyday appropria-> || tions and interpretations of power and identity J in the city, from the terrorist attack in Mumb 1 to the football clubs of Buenos Aires. Another related initiative of Appadurai, a non-profit. Partners for Urban Knowledge. Action and Research (PUKAR). has been valuable in viewing Mumbai as a conceptual base and laboratory to investigate cultural forms of niobnhzation.- Other postcolonial approaches have emphasized the broader regional and transnational dynamics that have shaped particular places. In a collection edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin Kruse (2008). the authors, focusing on expanding urban networks, have %-