Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the British Empire rose to a position of global dominance. It reached historically unprecedented geographical expansion and left a substantial physical footprint, fundamentally altering urban as well as rural environments. Across Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Oceania, architecture and urban planning were integral parts of the imperial project. They represented crucial tools for enforcing racial hierarchies and spatial segregation, for preventing anti-colonial resistance, and for promoting social and economic transformation. This course will introduce students to historical accounts of architecture and planning as tools of imperial rule and social engineering, but also as objects of political contestation and as sites for the making of a global imperial culture. Readings will outline the role of the built environment as a venue of British imperial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth century across a range of sites and historical contexts. Sessions will focus on the role of physical infrastructure — urban grids, public housing, dams, factories, prisons — as governance techniques but also as symbolic resources and means of identification. Our discussions will in particular highlight complex transnational exchanges between sites in which ideas — architectural styles and building types, but also approaches to slum clearance and disease control — travelled in various directions.
