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Algiers and the “Crouching Village” Where does one begin a spatial history of a city? Although Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore have had varying careers as major urban settlements, this chapter is devoted to excavating their spatial developments under colonial rule. If the Introduction posed the question of how a postcolonial country attempts to develop from a subordinate position, how exactly is that subordinate position effected in the first place,and by what spatial mechanisms? How has this process been understood in postcolonial and urban theory, and what can Western-oriented urban histories learn from colonial cities? A good place to begin is Frantz Fanon’s much-discussed passage from The Wretched of the Earth, in which he presents one of the most fertile descriptions we have of the colonial city. For Fanon, the problem of the colonial world is precisely its Manicheanism, the psychic effects of which are well described in his earlier book Black Skin, White Masks. In the colonized world, it is the spatial form of a bifurcated system that comes to bear the greatest resonance. To quote Fanon at length, The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. . . .    Imagining the Colonial City At some very basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others. —edward said, Culture and Imperialism In the name of the imperial project, space is evaluated and overlain with desire: creating homely landscapes out of “alien” territories, drawing distant lands into the maps of empire, establishing ordered grids of occupation. —jane m. jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City  Imagining the Colonial City The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt,and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings,unseen,unknown and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet . . . are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settlers’ town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners. The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness ; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession—all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man.And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive,“They want to take our place.”It is true,for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place. (–) What is striking in this account is not that it ends with the murderous desire of the colonized toward the colonizer—this is, after all, from the famous section “On Violence.” What is surprising is the centrality of the description of the colonial city, placed only a few pages into the book’s clarion call for decolonization. Fanon offers us a way to think through the consequences of the daily,bodily,lived experience of the...

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