Colonial urban administration rationalities were imported back into French cities

Evidence

Rabinow identified the links between French urbanism in the early twentieth century and its colonial antecedents in the late nineteenth. Rabinow’s work is important because it details the ties between the heroic technocrats who dreamed the future of the cities, the image de la ville which provided the armature for the realization of these dreams (Rabinow, 1989:5) and the management of urban populations. He demonstrates the realization of the colonial imperative to administer in the built form of colonial cities and the subsequent translation of such rationalities to the cities of the French mainland. Regimes of governmentality emerge through the histories of design: “Both in the garden cities and in the colonies, the symbolic central point of the city had been reserved for public administration. Administration was evolving from an organizing symbol to a technical consideration” (Rabinow 1989:358). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2274 (#expands, via linked claim)

France had achieved unparalleled supremacy in the moral, cultural, and social spheres as well. And although Paul Rabinow’s and Gwendolyn Wright’s view of the colonies as laboratories for policies originating in the metropole has shed new light on the history of the Third Republic, their studies have suffered from a conceptual blind spot as well. In focusing on the colonies as an extension of France, they have tended to ignore the impact of the colonized upon French ideas and actions. The colonies were never just laboratories; they were sites, however unequal, of conflict and negotiation between colonizer and colonized, where French assumptions about the ability of Africans to evolve, and of France to civilize them, were contested and periodically reshaped. … Indeed, in the French-African encounter, ideas and cultural practices did more than simply emanate from the metropole. The empire also had an impact upon the culture of metropolitan France. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 33 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: French urban planning domestically translated colonial techniques for administering populations — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2274; The colonized shaped French imperial ideas rather than merely receiving them — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 33; Colonial racial rationalization seeped back into the imperial metropoles

Broader Connections

• French urban planning domestically translated colonial techniques for administering populations #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2274
• The colonized shaped French imperial ideas rather than merely receiving them #complicates (0.72) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 33