French urban planning domestically translated colonial techniques for administering populations

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s concept of governmentality and the ‘conduct of conduct’ — relevant to the reader’s interest in how built form encodes power.
• SEED: An angle on how colonial administrative rationality migrated to metropolitan city planning — the reverse of the usual one-way colony-as-recipient story.