The settler colonial city in three movements

Abstract

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.

Interpreting spatial struggles in the historical record: Indigenous urbanism and erasure in 20th-century Mexico

“…Such a tendency poses challenges for understanding how historical struggles for a right to the city have shaped the terrain that contemporary movements must navigate. In particular, it obscures how Indigenous dispossession-as an ongoing condition of settler colonial city-making (Simpson and Hugill, 2022)-has been maintained through different historical periods and impedes a thorough documentation of the Indigenous productions of urban space that makes such a project permanently incomplete.…”

“…This socio-spatial dialectic-constituting Indigenous productions of space, on one hand, and formal urban planning embodying the ideals of a non-Indigenous elite, on the other hand-continues to unfold. As other scholars have noted, these movements are wrapped up in the uneven development of capitalism, for which ongoing dispossession is a precondition (Coulthard, 2014;Estes et al, 2021;Simpson and Hugill, 2022). Here, pushing out the small-scale livelihoods of Indigenous people had several implications for shifting and renewing spaces of capital accumulation.…”

“…Indigenous urbanism has been defined both as an exploration of how Indigenous peoples participate in, appropriate, and remake the urban space imposed through colonial legacy (Nejad et al, 2019) and as an analytic to examine the dialectical relationship between urbanism and Indigeneity, in which both are in flux and open to contestation (Dorries, 2023). Scholarship on Indigenous urbanism builds on a substantial body of work on settler colonial theory—which examines the mechanisms by which settlers dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and other resources to build settler societies in their place (Wolfe, 1999), noting that nowhere have Indigenous peoples been rendered more invisible than in cities (Coulthard, 2014; Hugill, 2017; Simpson and Hugill, 2022). Concerned with the way Indigenous peoples have been represented in urban culture—as either absent or marginal—scholars of Indigenous urbanism have sought to illuminate the diversity of experiences that constitute Indigenous experiences and productions of urban space, exploring, for example, how Indigenous people navigate multi-spatial identities in cities (Kukutai, 2013; Lucero, 2013); highlighted the activities of pan-Indigenous community spaces (Johnson, 2013; Ramirez, 2007); documented activism that reclaims urban space as Indigenous space (Negrín, 2019; Ramirez, 2020); and underscored Indigenous resurgence that counters the dispossession of land and other resources intrinsic to colonialism and racial capitalism, including the role of everyday place-making practices in unsettling colonialism (Barry and Agyeman, 2020; Barnd, 2017; Dorries et al, 2022; Ramirez, 2020).…”

Urban inequality revisited: From the corrugated city to the lopsided city

“…This is not to say that issues of class inequality have disappeared altogether from urban studies – they have certainly not, and remain a ‘meta-trope’ that is highly legible in the city. Class-based inequality continues to animate discussions of racial capitalism (Melamed, 2015), gentrification and displacement (Lees et al, 2016), the settler colonial city (Simpson and Hugill, 2022), and informality (Roy, 2009; Thieme et al, 2017). However, these literatures do not occupy the same prominence in urban studies as class-based inequality did in the 1990s, nor are they primarily driven by class-based inequalities.…”

Toward a Japanese paradigm of settler-colonial urbanism?

“…It also suggests that recent arguments about the importance of white supremacy and racial capitalism as drivers of settler-colonialism may not hold true in all settler-colonial contexts. 14 This is not to say racialized discourse did not exist in colonial Hokkaido, but rather that a white-centred framework of racialized colonialism may not explain the particular racial dynamics between non-white Japanese and non-white Ainu.…”