Cultural Geography

of the ‘map’s’ ineffectivity, a shift in the

Australian national discourse from the secular to

the sacred. Other studies trace the outcome of

policies of urban aestheticization which gesture

towards – yet stop short of – a full recognition of

Aboriginal difference in the city (Jacobs, 1998).

What is crucially important to recognize here,

however, is the degree of public acknowledge-

ment in Australia of a multicultural and post-

colonial consciousness and a cultural politics

willing to act on it. The postcolonial paradigm

here is not (as elsewhere) confined to cells within

the academy but operates on the streets. What this

reinforces is a point already made, namely that

how a postcolonial critique operates, and what it

does as a result, depends on local contingencies,

that is, how it shapes people’s thoughts and

conditions as specifically postcolonial.

Essays in Postcolonial Space(s), by an inter-

national group of architects and urbanists, bring

yet another angle to an understanding of the post-

colonial. In the words of the editors, ‘Postcolonial

space is a space of intervention into those archi-

tectural constructions that parade under a univer-

salist guise and either exclude or repress different

spatialities of often disadvantaged ethnicities,

communities or peoples’ (Nalbantoglu and Wong,

1997: 7). While representative chapters (for

example Nalbantoglu on the carved dwelling in

Turkey or Cairns on the traditional Javanese

house) successfully contest the boundaries of

what ‘architecture’ is usually taken to be, the

commitment of contributors to exploring innova-

tive poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist

and other approaches, characteristic of postcolo-

nial theory, needs also to be read alongside

accounts that acknowledge the persistent and

powerful material factors of uneven development

worldwide (Smith, 1984) and the corporate

knowledgeinfluences of global capitalism.

Whether postcolonial criticism can have real

political effects can be seen by comparing some

of the Australian cases cited above with the

account of Chatterjee and Kenny (1999) who

argue that, despite five decades of independence,

attempts to bridge the vast spatial, social, eco-

nomic and infrastructural inequities, as well as

religious, cultural and lifestyle differences,

between old and new Delhi, the legacy of hege-

monic colonial planning, and to create a single

capital symbolizing the unity and identity of the

nation, have yet to be resolved. In suggesting

reasons for this, the authors point to the ambigu-

ities of the postcolonial, the fact that ‘the

replacement of previous hierarchies of space,

power and knowledge has not been complete’;

‘Muslim, Hindu and western socio-cultural

norms co-exist, albeit uneasily, in Delhi’s built

environment’ (1999: 93). Multiple identities

produce a multiplicity of spatialities. The issue

of dealing with space and identity in postcolonial

(as well as other) cities deserves a monograph in

itself, not least because the recognitionof post-

coloniality apparently agitates outside commen-

tators more than indigenous governments and

professionals. Again, this demonstrates how dif-

ferent local circumstances of materiality produce

different conditions for the possibility of think-

ing and being postcolonial.

Yeoh’s (2001) overview of geographers’

research on postcolonial cities in the 1990s is

organized around four themes: identity, encoun-

ters, heritage and an interrogation of the rele-

vance of the postcolonial paradigm itself. A

cluster of studies has addressed the different

ways in which postcolonial states have endeav-

oured to engage with, but also distance them-

selves from, their colonial pasts, hopefully

cultivating new national citizen subjectivities in

the process: new capitals (Gilbert, 1985;

Holston, 1989; Perera, 1998) or capital com-

plexes (Vale, 1992), toponymic reinscription

(Yeoh, 1996), spectacular towers (King, 1996)

and transformative modernisms (Holston, 1989;

Kusno, 2000), among others. In Kusno’s telling

phrase, the spatial reformulations result from

what ‘the colonial and postcolonial have done to

each other’ but under very different political

regimes. Yet while, in Yeoh’s words, ‘architec-

ture and space can ... be interrogated for [their]

embodiment of colonial constructions and cate-

gories in order to reveal the postcolonial

condition’ (2001: 459), attempting to read

architectural meanings without the discourses

that accompany them is a notoriously ambiguous

project. As colonialism and imperialism are two

sides of the same coin, also important here are

the essays in Driver and Gilbert’s Imperial Cities

(1999). These address the architectural and urban

spaces constructed by imperialism in Europe’s

imperial metropoles – Paris, London, Rome and

Vienna, among others – demonstrating in the

process the urbanistic competition between these

capitals which European imperialisms generated.

Under ‘encounters’, Yeoh also reviews some of

the literature on the distinctive social, ethnic and

racial characteristics of postcolonial cities, and the

opportunities they offer for newly emergent prac-

tices and social identities (echoing themes in the

classic essay of Redfield and Singer, 1954), yet

also noting the resilience of older colonial repre-

sentations. Such ‘imagined pluralism ... is drawn

upon in positive ways to position the postcolonial

nation as a cosmopolitan society’ (2001: 460).

Issues of heritage in the postcolonial city are

buffeted between the cultural politics of different

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