Urban planning and school-building were linked tools of colonial-era modernization

Evidence

An ordered world for the powerful, a disordered one for the powerless— this was the geographic binary model (with its implied political threat) whose resolution was entrusted to Alï Mubärak during the twenty-five years that passed between his writing Alam al-Dïn and its publication in 1882. … With the full support of the state behind him, `Alï Mubärak became a primary agent of modernization. As Timothy Mitchell describes it,“Laying out the streets of a city and planning institutions of learning did not come together only by accident, by some chance in the career of an exceptional individual.” This conjunction of opportunity and need “indicated the concerns of his age.” As the intensive rebuilding of Cairo and the equally significant founding of schools showed, he constructed his life and the lives of many others around the connectedness between “spatial order and personal discipline.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 291

Categorization

• XREF: Mitchell’s spatial-order-and-discipline reading connects to the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure article and to broader work on grid-city building as colonial discipline.