Colonial school design made abstract order an end in itself.

Evidence

What characterises all these descriptions is a common attempt to construct order, which has come into being as an end in itself. As with the new streets of the city, physical space – even respirable air – has become a surface and volume that can be divided up and marked out into places where individuals are positioned. Such acts create order in the abstract, not only by marking divisions and determining where things are to be put, but by distributing according to intervals that are identically spaced and geometrically aligned. The regularity of the interval (every 21 cubic metres) and the precision of the angle (the four sides of a square) create a framework which appears prior to, and therefore separate from, the objects actually distributed. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s disciplinary power and the panopticon literature; also to the grid-city tradition in colonial planning.