Pre-colonial cities lacked any concept of plan-based order

Evidence

But there was no problem of order, in our own sense of a framework or plan, in such cities, just as there was no word naming such a thing in Ibn Khaldun. There was instead a cycle of fullness and emptiness, a continuous life which includes death (whereas order can never include disorder), a continuous building and rebuilding amid the forces of decay. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the book’s core argument that the plan/frame distinction is a distinctly Western, modern mental machinery.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion that order excludes disorder while life includes death is a genuinely dense conceptual move — it reframes what ‘order’ itself is by showing the modern category presupposes the very dichotomy pre-modern life dissolves.