Public shared places and private absent divides: Identity and space of colonial urbanism under Portuguese, French and Danish Rules: Diu, Pondicherry and Tranquebar

Abstract

Architecture, urbanism, and empire need a theoretical framework grounded in decolonization, informed by post-colonial, critical race, and feminist theories and critically engaged with the materiality of artworks, physical manifestations of imperialism, and sustainability. This capacious method enables a more nuanced and complex understanding of the historical imbrication of architecture, urbanism, and empire by addressing the colonial legacies of empire in architecture and urbanism with a constantly evolving process of skills acquisition to be clustered and reconfigured in response to the question dependent on language, fieldwork, and the range of architecture and cities considered. This chapter tests this model with a case study of three non-British cities in India, built by other European empires with interests in all of Asia.