The modern colonial city made the interior-exterior divide its founding principle.

Evidence

A second, related way of characterising the modern kind of order I have called enframing is that it works by determining a fixed distinction between outside and inside. There appears to be an unambiguous line along which an exterior frames an interior. The new colonial and European cities of the nineteenth century made their clearest principle the fixed divide between the bourgeois interior and the public exterior. There has been no difficulty since then in discovering a similar division in the traditional Middle Eastern town; similar but in fact more rigid, between the interior world of women and the family and the public, male world of the marketplace and mosque. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 188

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the reader’s interest in architectural worldbuilding and threshold/spatial order — connects to the prior chapter’s ‘enframing’ concept Mitchell introduced.