Cities, Post-Coloniality and International Law

Abstract

In recent decades, the local, the municipal and the city have emerged as virtuous spaces where development and global integration can finally be achieved in the postcolony. In this chapter, we locate this emergence within a broader history of international attempts to organise and regularise urban life through multi-scalar governance structures. We identify these structures as having developed from a paradigm of direct imperial control over colonial cities, to a moment in which local life came to be organised through national logics, to the present resurgence of the local and municipal in more decentralised and indirect ordering processes. These transformations, which remind us that global governance has always been a hands-on project, have been fuelled by the intensification of the global economic order and the concomitant need to discipline lands, peoples and their fellow non-humans accordingly.