Recent years have witnessed a surge of scholarly, artistic and documentary interest in colonial architecture and town planning. Paralleling the large body of work in the Western context concerning the pivotal position of social housing and town planning as governmental techniques for norming and forming the conduct and dispositions of specific populations, in the context of colonial Africa particular interest has been focused on a range of socio-spatial issues pertaining to African housing and urban planning in the formerly Italian, British, French and South African colonial spheres of influence (cf. Fuller 2006, Byerley 2005, Myers 2003, Cohen 2006, Elder 2003).

This panel invites a deeper comparative analysis of the colonial and post-colonial trajectories of colonial African housing and urban plans of the post-WWII era. Two particular aspects are in focus here. Firstly, work which explicates both the colonial governmental rationalities underlying specific colonial architectures (of power) in specific colonial contexts and the manner in which these authoritarian spaces were fashioned into sites for everyday life. Secondly, departing from Rodney Place’s notion of such colonial urban landscapes as ‘inherited machines – up-for-grabs territorial frames now waiting for waves of occupation’ (2006: 323), to use these sites as windows onto wider contemporary societal processes, particularly concerning the spheres of urban heritage, local urban politics and globalisation. These include: representations of the past; processes of familiarisation / defamiliarisation; the contested nature of historical memory; experiments in producing models of public memorial; the intersection of local urban planning priorities and the global heritage and conservation agenda.