What is a “settler‐colonial city” and how does it differ from other forms of imperial urban spatial organization? This article seeks to answer these questions by attempting to urbanize recent insights in settler‐colonial theory. It begins by considering well‐established theorizations of the “colonial city”—particularly those developed by geographers and urbanists in the 1970s and 1980s—in order to assess their suitability for analyses of contemporary settler‐colonial milieu. Building on this discussion, the paper asks if and how the insights of settler‐colonial theory offer new opportunities to renovate earlier theorizations in ways that are more explicitly relevant to making sense of the urban process in North America and other societies where colonists have “come to stay” and no formal process of decolonization has unfolded.
This paper traces the trajectory of scholarship on the settler colonial city and argues that this literature could pay closer attention to the dynamic circulations, movements, and mobilities that constitute and sustain urban space. It foregrounds the ways that the movement of commodities, capital, and people must be assiduously managed in order to preserve settler colonial relations in the city and beyond. Building on existing work, it argues that “settler colonial urbanism” operates as a regime of spatial management which is connected to other sites of racial capitalist extraction and accumulation across global space.
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