Edge of Empire: Transnationalism and identity in Wellington,New Zealand,ca . 1860- ca . 1920

Aspects of transnationalism and identity in the period from the 1860s to the mid 1920s, which set in motion a form of globalization related to empire, are focused upon. The notion of 'regimes of representation' is adapted as a broad conceptual framework for exploring the role of colonial directories in establishing the identity of metropolitan commercial culture in Wellington, New Zealand. This outpost of empire is examined through a detailed analysis of the images presented in a series of directories by Kelly's and Wise. These reveal how British commerce established a strong and lasting identity in the colony through a variety of 'acts of representation'. It is concluded that colonial directories are a worthwhile but neglected source for exploring the geographies of empire.     

Colonial Settlers and the Metropole: Racial discourse in the early 19th-century Cape Colony,Australia and New Zealand

The ways that British settlers in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, particularly those engaged in the extension of commercial sheep farming, constructed a certain discourse of colonialism during the first half of the 19th century are discussed. It is argued that this discourse was formulated, at least in part, in opposition to that of humanitarians within each colony and in Britain, who challenged settler capitalist practices on the fringes of Britain's expanding empire. Representations of a civilizing impact on the landscape were one component of the new racialized understandings and identities that settlers at each site constructed in their defence. Through attention to three colonial sites and their relations with each other and with the metropole, it is aimed to highlight the ways in which discourses of colonial landscapes and their inhabitants travelled across an imperial terrain.     

Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: The discovery and defence of indigenous flora at the Cape ca. 1890-1939

The colonial elite in the south-western Cape were historically aficionados of exotic flora and disdainful of the region's indigenous vegetation. This changed rapidly in the half century after ca. 1890 with the indigenization of botanical science and the emergence of a distinctive Cape botany, practised and patronized by the Cape Town patriciate. The botanists' re-imagining of the indigenous flora as the 'Cape Floral Kingdom', an ancient and endangered flora without equal anywhere in the world, served ideological and practical purposes for their sponsors. Floral nativism provided both a sense of identity for an emerging White settler nationalism and a justification for evicting the underclass from the commons and their conversion into a preserve for patrician leisure and contemplation. The political realignments of Union, however, left the Cape Town patriciate isolated and forced them to seek a broader popular audience among the urban middle classes of the region and United Kingdom. By the eve of the Second World War, identification with the indigenous Cape flora had become a mark of class, ethnic and regional identity for the old imperial urban, English-speaking middle class marooned in a new nation state governed by rural, Afrikaans republicanism.     

Colonial Settlers and the Metropole: racial discourse in the early 19th-century Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand

The ways that British settlers in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, particularly those engaged in the extension of commercial sheep farming, constructed a certain discourse of colonialism during the first half of the 19th century are discussed. It is argued that this discourse was formulated, at least in part, in opposition to that of humanitarians within each colony and in Britain, who challenged settler capitalist practices on the fringes of Britain's expanding empire. Representations of a civilizing impact on the landscape were one component of the new racialized understandings and identities that settlers at each site constructed in their defence. Through attention to three colonial sites and their relations with each other and with the metropole, it is aimed to highlight the ways in which discourses of colonial landscapes and their inhabitants travelled across an imperial terrain.     

Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: the discovery and defence of indigenous flora at the Cape ca. 1890-1939

The colonial elite in the south-western Cape were historically aficionados of exotic flora and disdainful of the region's indigenous vegetation. This changed rapidly in the half century after ca. 1890 with the indigenization of botanical science and the emergence of a distinctive Cape botany, practised and patronized by the Cape Town patriciate. The botanists' re-imagining of the indigenous flora as the 'Cape Floral Kingdom', an ancient and endangered flora without equal anywhere in the world, served ideological and practical purposes for their sponsors. Floral nativism provided both a sense of identity for an emerging White settler nationalism and a justification for evicting the underclass from the commons and their conversion into a preserve for patrician leisure and contemplation. The political realignments of Union, however, left the Cape Town patriciate isolated and forced them to seek a broader popular audience among the urban middle classes of the region and United Kingdom. By the eve of the Second World War, identification with the indigenous Cape flora had become a mark of class, ethnic and regional identity for the old imperial urban, English-speaking middle class marooned in a new nation state governed by rural, Afrikaans republicanism.     

The networks of tropical architecture

The concept of tropical architecture is one that was constructed in the 1950s to link the work of modernist practitioners in a number of locations outside the West. Tropical architecture has been represented as a form of critical regionalism, in that it offers a language based in the conditions of the non-western world. While this may be true of the movement in the Americas, in the case of the British colonies of West Africa tropical architecture was located within the networks of modernist and colonial culture as much as it was place bound. Tropical architecture was established in the metropolitan architectural circles of the 1950s through the use of the term in books and journals, a conference and a course of specialisation in London. These forms of support assisted architects to create modern architecture in far-flung sites, under difficult conditions. Despite this enmeshment of the peripheral sites of practice with the colonial metropolis through communications, tropical architecture was seen as something other than colonial architecture. The changing political and economic opportunities at the end of the colonial period prompted architects to develop a post-colonial identity for architecture, which was done through the representation of their approach as one that could transcend national boundaries. Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zones , by Fry and Drew explicitly offers support for an imaginary architect who comes from a generic tropical zone. The influence of the metropolis on the culture of tropical architecture remained significant, even after independence. While the consistency of approaches that marked the work of the 1950s has been replaced by a multiplicity of attitudes to design, the contemporary literature, curricula and research on African architecture share an emphasis on its climatic conditions. This content, in turn, ties the approach to authoritative sources in the West, giving it an identity that links the local and the global in complex and interdependent ways.     

The networks of tropical architecture

The concept of tropical architecture is one that was constructed in the 1950s to link the work of modernist practitioners in a number of locations outside the West. Tropical architecture has been represented as a form of critical regionalism, in that it offers a language based in the conditions of the non-western world. While this may be true of the movement in the Americas, in the case of the British colonies of West Africa tropical architecture was located within the networks of modernist and colonial culture as much as it was place bound.

Tropical architecture was established in the metropolitan architectural circles of the 1950s through the use of the term in books and journals, a conference and a course of specialisation in London. These forms of support assisted architects to create modern architecture in far-flung sites, under difficult conditions. Despite this enmeshment of the peripheral sites of practice with the colonial metropolis through communications, tropical architecture was seen as something other than colonial architecture. The changing political and economic opportunities at the end of the colonial period prompted architects to develop a post-colonial identity for architecture, which was done through the representation of their approach as one that could transcend national boundaries. Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zones , by Fry and Drew explicitly offers support for an imaginary architect who comes from a generic tropical zone.

The influence of the metropolis on the culture of tropical architecture remained significant, even after independence. While the consistency of approaches that marked the work of the 1950s has been replaced by a multiplicity of attitudes to design, the contemporary literature, curricula and research on African architecture share an emphasis on its climatic conditions. This content, in turn, ties the approach to authoritative sources in the West, giving it an identity that links the local and the global in complex and interdependent ways.     

Typical Travel Events and the Reversal of Modern Image of China

In order to open up the Chinese market,Britain sent two missions to China in 1791 and 1816.The most powerful colonial empire in the world met the most powerful feudal empire in the world.The two sides led the negotiations and exchanges with the concepts of "tribute" and "equal diplomacy",and the failure of the missions of Macartney and Amherst to China was inevitable.The travel texts completed by the members of the mission recorded the process of travel to China and their views on China in detail.Two typical travel events in China completely reversed the western image of China.     

Designing civic space: changing notions of the public in Seoul's Old and New City Halls

This paper discusses the history of Seoul's old city hall, first constructed in 1926, and the architecture of the adjacent new city hall, completed in 2012. The controversies surrounding the preservation of the old city hall are illustrative of a conflict between the desires to preserve historic buildings on the one hand, and to erase colonial traces on the other. This study looks at how the old and new city halls reflect changing notions of the public and of civic space since the 1920s. The design of the old city hall had the effect of inadvertently integrating a previously unrepresented group into the public, as it was a result of a complex interaction between modern aspirations and the colonial reality. The design of the new city hall reveals an evolution in the ways that architectural representations in South Korea have dealt with colonial memories. This case study hints at some of the possibilities of a post-colonial architecture by showing how colonial binary constructions of identity were transformed by new spatial formulations.     

Putrajaya: Malaysia’s new federal administrative capital

In the early 1990s, the Malaysian government conceived of a new federal administrative capital built from a tabula rasa on former oil palm and rubber plantations called Putrajaya. It was designed to be the new home to all of Malaysia’s federal government ministries and national level civil servants, host all diplomatic activities for the country, and function as a potent symbol of the nation’s ambitious modernization agenda and of its new ‘progressive Muslim’ identity. As one of many new cities recently built as seats of power in Southeast Asia and the ‘global south’, Putrajaya is emblematic of the trend of former colonies to reject the colonial capital and to replace it with a city that symbolizes the state’s national ideology and aspirations. This article provides a brief overview of the history and development of Malaysian urbanism that set the stage for the creation of Putrajaya and critically examines its claims of being ‘green’. Particular attention is paid to how a national identity has been constructed through the design of the city.     

Names,norms and forms: French and indigenous toponyms in early colonial Dakar,Senegal

Research on street naming systems in general and on colonial street names in particular is not abundant. This article examines the French colonial policy regarding street names in Dakar, as well as the accompanying colonial terminology that was applied in Dakar’s quarters. With occasional references to the pre‐colonial and the post‐colonial periods, the main focus of this article is on street names in early colonial Dakar, as they were designated by the preliminary master plan of Pinet‐Laprade in the 1860s. While residential segregation was never a stated policy on the part of the colonial authorities there, who formally fostered assimilation, it will be shown that toponyms had a key role in the alienation of the indigenous population in the city centre. As Dakar’s city centre was considered ‘European’ and a chief lieu de colonisation in West Africa, its colonial urban toponyms reflected an official memory that excluded African histories and identities. Using original historical evidence, alternative naming systems of reference to certain urban areas on the part of the Dakarois will be discussed – systems that sometimes challenged and sometimes supplemented their French counterparts.     

Bubonic plague,colonial ideologies,and urban planning policies: Dakar,Lagos, and Kumasi

The Third Plague Pandemic originated in Southwest China in the mid-nineteenth century, reached Africa's shores around 1900, and spread globally for about a century. This article examines three plague loci in colonial Senegal (Dakar, 1914), Nigeria (Lagos, 1924), and the Gold Coast (today's Ghana; Kumasi, 1924). A tripartite comparative analysis is made of French and British doctrines of colonial rule, colonial urban planning policies, and anti-plague practices. While some common features are demonstrated in the policies and practices of the colonizing forces such as the implementation of rigorous measures and embracing segregationist solutions, divergent features can also be distinguished. These relate to the methods of implementation of planning and anti-plague policies, in accordance with colonial ideology (assimilation, direct and indirect rule); and to the very nature of autochthonous communities, responses, and levels of agitation. Our both comparative and more nuanced site-related view is also based on a large collection of archival and secondary materials from multilateral channels.     

‘The Congo must have a presence on Belgian soil.‘ The concept of representation in governmental discourses on the architecture of the Ministry of Colonies in Brussels, 1908–1960

While parliament buildings and governor‘s palaces have been studied as embodiments of governmental or colonial power, the architecture of the often more mundane state administrative office buildings has only received scant attention from architectural historians. In this article, we seek to demonstrate that political discourses concerning such buildings can nonetheless reveal important conceptions of colonial power. Rather than focussing on how such power was accommodated in and shaped by state-built architecture overseas, this article draws attention to the representational aspects of colonial governance in a mother country through an analysis of various projects proposed for the Belgian Ministry of Colonies (1908–1960). In the 1930s, when it was still housed in an eighteenth-century neoclassical building in Brussels, the Ministry of Colonies was included in a visionary but unsuccessful civil service reform, which was aimed at a modernisation of the Belgian state bureaucracy and its office buildings. After the Second World War, when colonialism became increasingly criticised in international fora, successive Belgian Ministers of Colonies pleaded for the construction of a new, grandiose ministerial complex, which was supposed to symbolise efficiency, modernity, and—above all —the permanence of the colonial undertaking. Even though important steps were taken to realise this complex, the project was outrun by the global decolonisation process, of which the independence of the Belgian Congo (1960) was an inevitable outcome.     

THE HEAVENLY JERUSALEM AS THE VIRTUAL CITY: REVISITING DE CIVITATE DEI,CITY OF VIRTUE

Taking a lead from the work of Hannah Arendt and from M. Christine Boyer, this paper seeks to locate the discussion concerning the virtual city in a traditional discourse concerning citizenship. In De civitate Dei, the theme of citizenship is shown to mask a metaphor for order and justice informed by right desire. This order is seen to be couched in late empire dialectics, concerning tlie agonistic state of human identity and of cities, and the necessity for sacrifice in the foundation of city order. Justice is based not in a discussion of rights but of virtue. Augustine renders the virtual city as a symbol of pilgrimage and participation.     

The Arab village: a genealogy of (post)colonial imagination

This article critically discusses the image and the imagining of the Arab village produced by two cultures, the national-Zionist from the 1930s onwards, and the national-Palestinian during the last decade. Unlike fellow theorists and researchers, we are reluctant to be satisfied with the claim that throughout history the Jews, establishing their identity vis-à-vis the rural and oriental ‘other’, perceived the Arab village in an inversely mirrored manner. Instead, we suggest that it took the Arab village only a few years to transform from an object which represents the ‘other’ and a signifier of the backward enemy, to what we would define as ‘still life’, a-historical and de-politicised. The Arab village, we would argue, became an object, a source of colonial imagination in the Israeli architectural culture, which sought the ‘local’ in order to establish a national identity, without associating it with its creator, the Arab society. Within this framework, we also suggest that through a process of ‘mutual contamination’ the Arab village is perceived and politically re-constructed by Palestinian architectural discourse and practice within the boundaries of Israel.     

A Theosophical Garden City: designing household life in Bombay,circa 1924

Histories of the Garden City in the colonial world have brought attention to planning professionals, colonial officials, and native elites who instituted new economic and political practices through the construction of garden cities and suburbs. Less well known is that the Theosophical Society, a worldwide heterodox religious movement, appropriated the imagery and terminology of the Garden City to imagine a novel form of suburban living and political community in late colonial South Asia. Although Theosophists were among the earliest residents of Letchworth, in 1924 the Theosophical Society created a ‘Theosophical Garden City’ on the outskirts of Bombay that bore little resemblance to British garden cities and suburbs. Formed amid growing demands in India for national independence, this Theosophical Garden City envisioned India as a federation of localities within a polycentric ‘world-empire’. Examining architectural and town plans for the Theosophical Garden City, this article argues that the creation of a Theosophical community, and the imagining of India’s future place in a global union of nations, depended less on the display of esoteric symbols in communal gathering spaces and more on the design of household life.     

The politics of public space planning in Singapore

This paper considers the role of, and hence the social and political significance that has been accorded to, the design and provision of public spaces in the urban planning process. This approach gives useful insights into understanding the role these spaces have played in the colonial and post‐colonial city of Singapore. This discussion argues that public spaces in both the colonial and the post‐colonial city are essentially constructions by the ruling élite and its planning regime and are thus politically charged. Popular involvement has been singularly lacking in the planning and development of public spaces in post‐colonial Singapore. Instead, the general public has been marginalized in the creation of these spaces by the colonial and post‐colonial state. The completeness of this exclusion is shown through the demise of most of the vital and liveliest, albeit previously appropriated, public spaces of the colonial city. Public housing and the re‐invention of public spaces provided by a new social and political order followed the end of British colonial rule. In the following discussion, the role and significance of public spaces through the colonial period and then in the post‐colonial developmental state are examined. It is shown that public space provision by government authorities has served initially more as an imposition of colonial ideals and social segregation, and latterly as a reification of the prevailing political ideology, than in meeting real public needs for such spaces. A major focus of this article is the use of public space as a political tool of control by the state over its denizens in the Foucauldian sense, and how this could be construed even through different systems of governance and political agendas in Singapore.     

America Town: Planning the Outposts of Empire

The U. S. military is clearly a driving force in this era of American empire. Given this empire's global reach, what are its local impacts? Crimes and contamination are the most obvious and well-publicized ones. Less well known are the policies and projects that have contributed to the creation of sprawling bases scattered across the globe. Although there are obvious ideological critiques to the presence of overseas bases, this article offers a unique and particular spatial critique. Underlying superficial attempts at architectural compatibility are policies of fear and desires for identity that drastically increase the economic, cultural, and political costs of empire's reach.     

A Journey to the Heart: Affecting Engagement at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Abstract

This paper examines how Indigenous cultures and their connections to country are presented to the public in protected areas through a textual analysis of interpretive signage. In protected areas, different representational tropes are used to interpret colonial/settler, natural heritage and Indigenous landscapes and places. This paper begins by exploring the extent to which these contrasting interpretive strategies signify to visitors a hierarchy of place value in protected areas. It then asks whether the signage at Indigenous places alienates contemporary communities from country and history through a distant and detached view of culture, authorised via the template of scientific objectivity. These questions will be explored through an account that concludes with a consideration of the affective registers afforded to visitors within the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.     

New plans for housing in urban Kenya, 1939–63

Until about 1939, guided by a policy of trusteeship, the colonial government in Kenya limited the number of Africans in urban areas. As elsewhere in East and Central Africa, employers and municipalities were supposed to provide only ‘bachelor’ housing for unaccompanied African men. After 1939, encouraged by London, the Kenyan government began to promote a policy of development which implied urbanization. The permanent presence of Africans in towns was accepted, as was the growing responsibility of municipalities for the provision of housing for families as well as for bachelors. Municipalities began to plan for new types of housing, with more community facilities in new types of neighbourhood layouts. From the early 1940s, a wave of construction created many thousands of new dwellings in all major urban areas, but only a minority were designed for families. Many women and children were accommodated in ‘bachelor’ housing where they were compensated through rental subsidies. Although Kenya’s housing initiatives in the late colonial period did not satisfy all of the rapidly growing urban needs, they were a substantial achievement.