Built city layouts functioned as political expression representing French national virtues

Evidence

The colonial city was to be unambiguously expressive. Its layout and its buildings were to represent, in the words of the architect who built Rabat, ‘the genius for order, proportion and clear reasoning’ of the French nation. As a system of political expression, each building in the city seemed to stand for something further. Lyautey’s language in naming the buildings actually named instead this something further: ‘Here, Public Works. Next to it, Roads and Bridges …’ The method of building and naming made present to the visitor the order and the institutions of colonial authority. Later on when they entered ‘Forests’, there seemed to hang in the air ‘the faint smell of cedar’, so perfectly did the building represent the larger abstraction for which it stood. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 502

Categorization

• XREF: The cedar smell in ‘Forests’ is the perfect synecdoche for how the city-as-diagram is supposed to convert signifier into signified — echoing the map/island dialectic the book has been circling throughout.