The Post-Imperial Urban Environment

In this chapter we turn to themes of race, space, environmental justice, and indigenous reassertions in the post-colonial city. We will use as examples: services and urban planning in Singapore; riots in Sydney; and a comparative discussion of parks and public symbols. Although the location of cities had largely been fixed in the colonial period, they were undergoing rapid change by the mid-twentieth century as communities from the surrounding countryside poured into the urban areas. At the beginning of the twentieth century, one tenth of the world’s population lived in cities; by its end more than half did so. In 1900 the ten largest cities were located in Europe and the US, with the exception of Tokyo at seventh. By the early twenty-first century no European urban agglomerations were in this league. The balance shifted from the West to the rest, especially after 1950. Of former colonial cities, Greater Mumbai with about 16 million people, Kolkata (13 million), and Delhi (13 million) were in this group. Mumbai had housed around one million people in 1911. Cities in non-settler states became increasingly dominated, demographically, by the descendants of rural communities from their hinterlands. While English often served as a common medium of communication, regional languages also urbanized with their speakers. Overall, urbanization was linked with rising living standards. But, especially in mega-cities, the gap increased between the rich and overwhelming numbers of urban poor, most of whom were not able to make it into formal employment. Rates of growth in former settler cities were usually less sudden, but they also became increasingly culturally diverse. Canadian cities are one example. The small migrations of indigenous people were only one reason for this. Their increasing multi-ethnicity resulted largely from new sources of global migration: for example, the movement of people from non-British parts of Europe, from the Caribbean, as well as African Americans, Indians, and East Asians. Post-colonial conflict created new diasporas: some of the 80,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 went to Canada, and Toronto became home to the single largest population of expatriate Somalis.

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