The urban: Past, present, future

In part, because of the absence of detailed city histories, the precise mechanisms through which colonial power was inscribed on the emergent city of the global south remain unclear. At the same time, the fact that the umbilical cord of colonial inf luence is maintained in post-colonial cities is consistently asserted. Several chapters in this section address these tensions. Home is careful in his masterful account of the relationship between planning and colonial practice to eschew overgeneralization as he highlights regional and temporal differences in the acts of inclusion and domination that were ushered in by the (unequal) ordering of the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An overall picture of urbanism in colonized territories - rather than a generic model of the colonial city - emerges, demonstrating that colonial rule was (unevenly) embedded in the everyday political and administrative practices of running the city.